Cultural influence on COVID-19 cognitions and growth speed: the role of cultural collectivism

Abstract

Many challenges faced by humans require large-scale cooperation for communal benefits. We examined what motivates such cooperation in the context of social distancing and mask wearing to reduce the transmission intensity of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). We hypothesized that collectivism, a cultural variable characterizing the extent that individuals see themselves in relation to others, contributes to people’s willingness to engage in these behaviors. Consistent with preregistered predictions, across three studies (n=2864), including a U.S. nationally representative sample, people’s collectivist orientation is positively associated with intentions, positive beliefs, norm perceptions, and policy support for the preventive behaviors. In separate analyses at the country level (n=69 countries), more collectivist countries demonstrated lower growth rate in both COVID-19 confirmed cases and deaths. Together, these studies demonstrate the positive role of collectivism at the individual- and country-level in reducing COVID-19 transmission, and highlight the need to consider culture in public health policies and communications.

“It’s a war! It’s a battle! It’s a fight!”: Do militaristic metaphors increase people's threat perceptions and support for COVID-19 policies?

“…Research on long-term attitudes and behaviours has frequently shown that personality variables, such as different traits, personal values or convictions often explain substantial variance in the prediction of health-related behaviours (Cockerham et al, 2006;Raynor & Levine, 2009;Vollrath & Torgersen, 2008). With regard to emotional and behavioural responses to COVID-19, risk aversion (Nikolov et al, 2020), trust in politicians and in science (Lalot et al, in press;Kreps & Kriner, 2020) as well as collectivism (Huang et al, 2020;Pei et al, 2020) have been identified as relevant predictors. To be able to disentangle potential framing effects from possibly confounding variables, we integrated these variables as personality-related covariates.…”

Balancing the Freedom-Security Tradeoff During Crises and Disasters

“…Especially when increased security becomes socially normative, acting in line with group norms and for the safety of others may not feel like losing freedom to the same extent as it would to people in a more individualistic cultural context. Consistent with this possibility, some initial evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic suggests that higher levels of collectivism were related to greater support of restrictive policies (Pei et al, 2020), greater compliance with mask and social distancing mandates (Bazzi et al, 2021;Huang et al, 2020;Lu et al, 2021), lower rates of mental health distress (Germani et al, 2020; though see also Kowal et al, 2020), and lower rates of virus transmission and death (Pei et al, 2020).…”

Dualistic Determinants of COVID-19 Vaccination Intention among University Students in China: From Perceived Personal Benefits to External Reasons of Perceived Social Benefits, Collectivism, and National Pride

“…In particular, collectivism and national pride are socio-cultural components of social capital [21,22] that often enhance actions to improve community wellbeing [23]. Influenza vaccination [24] and use of protective measures to prevent COVID-19 [25][26][27] were associated with social capital. These two social capital external factors may thus affect COVID-19 vaccination independently from the effect of perceived personal benefits.…”