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

ABSTRACT

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.