Tribalism and Compassion in the Age of a Pandemic

This essay draws on resources in philosophy, psychology, and related social sciences—specifically, works by Joshua Greene, Jonathan Haidt, George Lakoff, and Martha Nussbaum—to analyze the moral and political dimensions of the recent polarization in the United States related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Three questions are addressed: (a) What psychological factors may have contributed to this polarization? (b) Why have conservatives and liberals taken the positions they have on issues relating to the pandemic (e.g., masks, economic reopening, vaccines, science)? and (c) How can we reduce this polarization and work more effectively with others to face societal challenges, despite our differences? © 2022 Society for Values in Higher Education. All rights reserved.

It's Not the Flu: Popular Perceptions of the Impact of COVID-19 in the U.S.

Messaging from U.S. authorities about COVID-19 has been widely divergent. This research aims to clarify popular perceptions of the COVID-19 threat and its effects on victims. In four studies with over 4,100 U.S. participants, we consistently found that people perceive the threat of COVID-19 to be substantially greater than that of several other causes of death to which it has recently been compared, including the seasonal flu and automobile accidents. Participants were less willing to help COVID-19 victims, who they considered riskier to help, more contaminated, and more responsible for their condition. Additionally, politics and demographic factors predicted attitudes about victims of COVID-19 above and beyond moral values; whereas attitudes about the other kinds of victims were primarily predicted by moral values. The results indicate that people perceive COVID-19 as an exceptionally severe disease threat, and despite prosocial inclinations, do not feel safe offering assistance to COVID-19 sufferers. This research has urgent applied significance: the findings are relevant to public health efforts and related marketing campaigns working to address extended damage to society and the economy from the pandemic. In particular, efforts to educate the public about the health impacts of COVID-19, encourage compliance with testing protocols and contact tracing, and support safe, prosocial decision-making and risk assessment, will all benefit from awareness of these findings. The results also suggest approaches, such as engaging people's stable values rather than their politicized perspectives on COVID-19, that may reduce stigma and promote cooperation in response to pandemic threats.

Moralizing the COVID-19 Pandemic: Self-Interest Predicts Moral Condemnation of Other's Compliance, Distancing, and Vaccination.

The emergence of the novel coronavirus has put societies under tremendous pressure to instigate massive and rapid behavior change. Throughout history, an effective strategy to facilitate novel behaviors has been to morally condemn those who do not behave in an appropriate way. Accordingly, here, we investigate if complying with the advice of health authorities-for example, to physically distance or vaccinate-has emerged as a moralized issue during the COVID-19 pandemic. In Study 1, we rely on data (N = 94K) from quota-sampled rolling cross-sectional online surveys from eight countries (Denmark, Sweden, Germany, France, Italy, Hungary, the United Kingdom, and the United States). We find that large majorities find it justified to condemn those who do not keep a distance to others in public and around half of respondents blame ordinary citizens for the severity of the pandemic. Furthermore, we identify the most important predictors of condemnation to be behavior change and personal concern, while institutional trust and social distrust also play large but less consistent roles. Study 2 offers a registered replication of our findings on a representative sample of Britons (N = 1.5K). It shows that both moralization and condemnation of both vaccination and general compliance are best predicted by self-interested considerations.

Moralization and Mismoralization in Public Health.

Moralization is a social-psychological process through which morally neutral issues take on moral significance. Often linked to health and disease, moralization may sometimes lead to good outcomes; yet moralization is often detrimental to individuals and to society as a whole. It is therefore important to be able to identify when moralization is inappropriate. In this paper, we offer a systematic normative approach to the evaluation of moralization. We introduce and develop the concept of 'mismoralization', which is when moralization is metaethically unjustified. In order to identify mismoralization, we argue that one must engage in metaethical analysis of moralization processes while paying close attention to the relevant facts. We briefly discuss one historical example (tuberculosis) and two contemporary cases related to COVID-19 (infection and vaccination status) that we contend to have been mismoralized in public health. We propose a remedy of de-moralization that begins by identifying mismoralization and that proceeds by neutralizing inapt moral content. De-moralization calls for epistemic and moral humility. It should lead us to pull away from our tendency to moralize-as individuals and as social groups-whenever and wherever moralization is unjustified.

Digital literacy as preventive ethics metacognitive education for the post-COVID-19 media context

During the COVID-19 pandemic and the infodemic that accompanied it, digital literacy proved to be a preventive approach with the possibility of offering future guidance to contemplate the negative influences of digital media in the post-pandemic context. However, this emphasis on the potentialities of digital literacy requires, at the same time, a review of its traditional assumptions, in order to optimize its characteristics in the future context. One of the central aspects of this review is related to the inclusion of the interference that cognitive biases have in the use of contemporary digital media, in which misinformation and misinformation proliferate. A clear example of this during the pandemic has been the spread of multiple conspiracy theories. Starting from here, the objective of this article will be to analyze the possible contribution of metacognition, when it is understood as a fundamental component of digital literacy.

Three pitfalls of accountable healthcare rationing.

A pandemic may cause a sudden imbalance between available medical resources and medical needs where fundamental care to a patient cannot be delivered. Inability to fulfil a professional commitment to deliver care as needed can lead to distress among caregivers and patients. This distress is sometimes alleviated through mechanisms that hide the facts that care is rationed and not all medical needs are met. We have identified three mechanisms that jeopardise accountable and optimal allocation of resources: (1) hidden value judgements that allow rationing under the disguise of triage or prioritisation, (2) disguised conflict of interest between societal and individual patient's needs and (3) concealed biases in the application of medical tools. Under these three pitfalls decisions of resource allocation and who gets treated are handled as medical decisions: normative decisions are concealed and perceived as falling with the realm of medical judgement. Value judgements and moral agency are hidden to offer a 'false sense of medical judgement', while in fact there are several ethical judgements and biases at stake. The three pitfalls entail hidden normative deliberation and are inappropriate for sustainable healthcare delivery and resource allocation. We believe it is necessary to maintain transparency in decision making under conditions of insufficient resources to maintain trust in professional care givers and secure fair treatment allocation. Recognition of the pitfalls, by applying our recommendations, may help to ensure transparent and accountable distribution of care and contribute to public acceptance of the ethics behind rationing.

Moral responses to the COVID-19 crisis.

The COVID-19 pandemic has raised complex moral dilemmas that have been the subject of extensive public debate. Here, we study how people judge a set of controversial actions related to the crisis: relaxing data privacy standards to allow public control of the pandemic, forbidding public gatherings, denouncing a friend who violated COVID-19 protocols, prioritizing younger over older patients when medical resources are scarce, and reducing animal rights to accelerate vaccine development. We collected acceptability judgements in an initial large-scale study with participants from 10 Latin American countries (N = 15 420). A formal analysis of the intrinsic correlations between responses to different dilemmas revealed that judgements were organized in two dimensions: one that reflects a focus on human life expectancy and one that cares about the health of all sentient lives in an equitable manner. These stereotyped patterns of responses were stronger in people who endorsed utilitarian decisions in a standardized scale. A second pre-registered study performed in the USA (N = 1300) confirmed the replicability of these findings. Finally, we show how the prioritization of public health correlated with several contextual, personality and demographic factors. Overall, this research sheds light on the relationship between utilitarian decision-making and moral responses to the COVID-19 crisis.

Your health vs. my liberty: Philosophical beliefs dominated reflection and identifiable victim effects when predicting public health recommendation compliance during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In response to crises, people sometimes prioritize fewer specific identifiable victims over many unspecified statistical victims. How other factors can explain this bias remains unclear. So two experiments investigated how complying with public health recommendations during the COVID19 pandemic depended on victim portrayal, reflection, and philosophical beliefs (Total N = 998). Only one experiment found that messaging about individual victims increased compliance compared to messaging about statistical victims-i.e., "flatten the curve" graphs-an effect that was undetected after controlling for other factors. However, messaging about flu (vs. COVID19) indirectly reduced compliance by reducing perceived threat of the pandemic. Nevertheless, moral beliefs predicted compliance better than messaging and reflection in both experiments. The second experiment's additional measures revealed that religiosity, political preferences, and beliefs about science also predicted compliance. This suggests that flouting public health recommendations may be less about ineffective messaging or reasoning than philosophical differences.

High ideals: the misappropriation and reappropriation of the heroic label in the midst of a global pandemic.

The purpose of this article is to offer an alternative, more nuanced analysis of the labelling of frontline workers as heroes than originally proposed. Here, we argue that the hero narrative in itself need not be problematic, but highlight a number of wider factors that have led to the initial rise (and subsequent fall) in support for labelling frontline workers as heroes. Through our related work, we have gathered similar stories from frontline workers where they feel betrayed, let down or otherwise short-changed by the hero label, and we have sought to make sense of this through understanding more about how the hero label is used rather than what it means. In this article, we propose a way forward where there is greater discussion around the hero label in this context where individuals can be heroes but still struggle, still fail and still feel vulnerable, and where heroism is viewed as a state of interdependence between heroic actor and the wider group. It is true that heroes can inspire, lead, guide and build morale and camaraderie, but collective responsibility is held with us all. We can draw hope and energy from our heroes, but we must dig deep and be proactive, particularly in the face of adversity. In doing so, we support the heroes to lead from the front and ensure that even though we cannot physically help; we are not making their situation worse.

Moral relativists resist health mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a study of US residents during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, their moral judgments of noncompliance with health mandates predicted their failure to comply with these health-promoting guidelines (r = +0.87, n = 303). Moreover, and consistent with ethics position theory (Forsyth, 2020), moral relativism predicted both moral judgments of noncompliance and noncompliance itself, and these relationships remained significant when controlling for other factors, such as political orientation and race. Moral beliefs that emphasized minimizing harm to others (idealism), in contrast, were not associated with compliance. These findings are both empirically noteworthy and practically significant: (a) they affirm the close connections among moral personality, moral judgment, and individuals' actions in morally turbulent situations and (b) suggest moral framings will strengthen the effectiveness of health promotion campaigns.