Greater Traditionalism Predicts COVID-19 Precautionary Behaviors Across 27 Societies (preprint)

People vary in the extent to which they embrace their society’s traditions, impacting a range of social and political phenomena. People also vary in the degree to which they perceive disparate dangers as salient and necessitating a response. Over evolutionary time, traditions likely regularly offered direct and indirect avenues for addressing hazards; consequently, via multiple possible pathways, orientations toward tradition and toward danger may have become associated. Emerging research documents connections between individual differences in traditionalism and variation in threat responsivity in general, and pathogen-avoidance motivations in particular. Importantly, because threat-mitigating behaviors can conflict with competing priorities, the precise associations between traditionalism and pathogen avoidance likely depend on contextually contingent costs and benefits. The COVID-19 pandemic requires individuals to make decisions about consequential and costly pathogen-avoidance behaviors that can clash with other priorities. The pandemic therefore provides a real-world setting in which to test the posited relationship between traditionalism and pathogen avoidance across socio-political contexts. Across 27 societies (N = 7,844), we find that costly COVID-19-avoidance behaviors positively correlate with greater endorsement of traditional norms and values in a majority of countries. Accounting for the conflict that arises in some societies between public health precautions and competing priorities, such as the exercise of personal liberties, reveals a consistent relationship between traditionalism and COVID-19 precautions across an even wider range of social and cultural contexts. These findings support the thesis that traditionalism is associated with an enhanced tendency to attend to hazards.

Disease avoidance motives trade-off against social motives, especially mate-seeking, to predict social distancing: Evidence from the Covid-19 pandemic (preprint)

Many studies have sought to understand why people’s compliance with social distancing varied during the Covid-19 pandemic. Recent theory suggests that pathogen avoidance behavior is not based only on perceived risk, but on a trade-off between the perceived costs of pathogen exposure and the perceived benefits of social contact. We hypothesized that compliance with social distancing may therefore be explained by a trade-off between pathogen avoidance and social motives, especially mate-seeking. Two studies conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic gave results consistent with this proposition: compliance with social distancing was positively associated with disease avoidance motives but negatively associated with social, especially mating, motives. These associations remained after controlling for predictors identified by previous research, including risk perception and personality. Findings indicate that people who are more interested in seeking new romantic partners (e.g., young men) may be less inclined to socially distance and be more at risk of pathogen transmission.