Social and moral psychology of COVID-19 across 69 countries.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all domains of human life, including the economic and social fabric of societies. One of the central strategies for managing public health throughout the pandemic has been through persuasive messaging and collective behaviour change. To help scholars better understand the social and moral psychology behind public health behaviour, we present a dataset comprising of 51,404 individuals from 69 countries. This dataset was collected for the International Collaboration on Social & Moral Psychology of COVID-19 project (ICSMP COVID-19). This social science survey invited participants around the world to complete a series of moral and psychological measures and public health attitudes about COVID-19 during an early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic (between April and June 2020). The survey included seven broad categories of questions: COVID-19 beliefs and compliance behaviours; identity and social attitudes; ideology; health and well-being; moral beliefs and motivation; personality traits; and demographic variables. We report both raw and cleaned data, along with all survey materials, data visualisations, and psychometric evaluations of key variables.

The resentful undergrowth of nostalgia: Ontological insecurity, relative deprivation and powerlessness.

This article untangles competing conceptualisations of nostalgia and identifies a specific form of collective-restorative nostalgia as politically significant. We argue that the link between resentment and this type of nostalgia emerges from their joint critique of the socio-political realities of the present. Nostalgia provides spatial and temporal orientations for a group's experiences of resentment through highly selective recollections of the heartland and an idealised golden age. We hypothesize that nostalgia leverages the heartland and the golden age to formulate claims for recognition and restored status on behalf of those who feel left behind by late modernity. Next, the article uses structural equation modelling and the 2019 Belgian National Election Study to reveal how resentment (consisting of ontological insecurity, group relative deprivation, and powerlessness) mediates between structural characteristics and nostalgia. Our findings suggest that each component of resentment individually contributes to explaining the nostalgia of less educated and economically deprived individuals.

Predicting attitudinal and behavioral responses to COVID-19 pandemic using machine learning.

At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied machine learning on the multinational data collected by the International Collaboration on the Social and Moral Psychology of COVID-19 (N = 51,404) to test the predictive efficacy of constructs from social, moral, cognitive, and personality psychology, as well as socio-demographic factors, in the attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic. The results point to several valuable insights. Internalized moral identity provided the most consistent predictive contribution-individuals perceiving moral traits as central to their self-concept reported higher adherence to preventive measures. Similar results were found for morality as cooperation, symbolized moral identity, self-control, open-mindedness, and collective narcissism, while the inverse relationship was evident for the endorsement of conspiracy theories. However, we also found a non-neglible variability in the explained variance and predictive contributions with respect to macro-level factors such as the pandemic stage or cultural region. Overall, the results underscore the importance of morality-related and contextual factors in understanding adherence to public health recommendations during the pandemic.

National identity predicts public health support during a global pandemic.

Changing collective behaviour and supporting non-pharmaceutical interventions is an important component in mitigating virus transmission during a pandemic. In a large international collaboration (Study 1, N = 49,968 across 67 countries), we investigated self-reported factors associated with public health behaviours (e.g., spatial distancing and stricter hygiene) and endorsed public policy interventions (e.g., closing bars and restaurants) during the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic (April-May 2020). Respondents who reported identifying more strongly with their nation consistently reported greater engagement in public health behaviours and support for public health policies. Results were similar for representative and non-representative national samples. Study 2 (N = 42 countries) conceptually replicated the central finding using aggregate indices of national identity (obtained using the World Values Survey) and a measure of actual behaviour change during the pandemic (obtained from Google mobility reports). Higher levels of national identification prior to the pandemic predicted lower mobility during the early stage of the pandemic (r = -0.40). We discuss the potential implications of links between national identity, leadership, and public health for managing COVID-19 and future pandemics.

Attitudes Toward Asylum Policy in a Divided Europe: Diverging Contexts, Diverging Attitudes?

The large inflow of asylum-seekers in recent years has heralded a diversification in adopted asylum policies across European societies. Although a growing body of research has addressed these versatile approaches and their implications for the European integration project, insight into the social basis of these restrictive or open asylum policies remains underdeveloped. Hence, the current study provides detailed insight into public preferences for asylum policies and offers a new understanding of how these attitudes are affected by diverging socio-economic realities across Europe. In addition, this paper considers the role of individual factors that coincide with publicly adopted frames in contemporary asylum debates. In particular, to explain how contextual differences reflect on opinion climates, the impacts of the policy, economic, and migratory context are studied. On the individual-level, we focus on threat perception and human values, which represent humanitarian, economic, and cultural frames. To explore these relations, data on 20 countries from the European Social Survey Round 8 (2016) are analyzed through a multilevel structural equation modeling approach. Results indicate that, on the contextual-level, only unemployment rates have a significant impact and, rather surprisingly, lower unemployment rates provoke a more negative opinion climate. Yet, this relationship seems to be largely driven by some specific countries that are characterized by large unemployment rates and relatively positive opinion climates simultaneously. The migratory and policy context, on the other hand, do not influence attitudes toward asylum policy. This indicates that it is not necessarily the countries facing the largest inflow of asylum-seekers or issuing the most positive decisions on asylum applications that have the most restrictive opinion climates. As shown by the important roles of human values and threat perceptions, which represent widely adopted frames, public discourses seem much more important in explaining attitudes toward asylum policy across Europe.

Welfare deservingness opinions from heuristic to measurable concept: The CARIN deservingness principles scale.

A steadily growing number of studies investigate how popular support for social policies targeting particular groups is rooted in citizens' deservingness opinions. According to theory, people fall back on five criteria - Control, Attitude, Reciprocity, Identity and Need (CARIN) - to distinguish the deserving from the undeserving. Deservingness opinions are assumed to be important predictors of support for particular welfare arrangements. A striking feature of this emerging research, however, is that there is no agreed-upon strategy to measure deservingness. Most previous studies rely on proxy-variables rather than measuring the actual deservingness criteria. Deservingness functions as a heuristic rather than as a measured concept, which leads to conceptual confusion. To remedy this shortcoming, this contribution proposes and validates a new instrument -the CARIN deservingness principles scale- that captures the five basic deservingness principles. We analyse data from the Belgian National Election Study by means of structural equation modelling (SEM) to (1) test the dimensionality, validity and reliability of the scale, and (2) verify to what extent the five deservingness principles predict specific policy preferences (as a test of construct validity). Our analyses confirm that the five deservingness principles are distinct dimensions that are differently related to social structural variables and have divergent consequences for policy preferences. The finding of theoretically meaningful patterns of differentiated effects illustrates that the CARIN criteria represent distinct logics of social justice, and corroborates that our measurement instrument is capable of tapping into the essence of these criteria.

Walloons as General or Specific Others? A Comparison of anti-Walloon and anti-immigrant Attitudes in Flanders.

This study attempts to shed light on the structure, the prevalence and the determinants of anti-Walloon attitudes in Flanders. For this purpose, we contrast anti-Walloon prejudice with prejudice against a relatively well-understood and archetypical out-group, namely immigrants. Our theoretical approach draws on insights from two paradigms of intergroup relations: the Group-Focused Enmity approach stressing that specific prejudices have a strong common denominator, and the Differentiated Threat model arguing that specific prejudices are contingent on the context of intergroup relations as well as the involved types of threat. To assess the (dis)similarities in anti-Walloon and anti-immigrant prejudice, we use the Flemish dataset of the Belgian National Election Study (BNES) 2010. Comparable measurement instruments for both forms of prejudice are analyzed by means of structural equation modeling. Our results reveal a nuanced picture regarding the similarities and differences between anti-Walloon and anti-immigrant attitudes in Flanders. One the one hand, anti-Walloon and anti-immigration attitudes are strongly correlated and rooted in economic threat perceptions. On the other hand, anti-Walloon attitudes are less outspoken in the Flemish population than anti-immigrant attitudes, are less founded on cultural threat perceptions and are more closely linked to feelings of identification with the Flemish in-group.