Greater traditionalism predicts COVID-19 precautionary behaviors across 27 societies

Abstract

People vary both in their embrace of their society’s traditions, and in their perception of hazards as salient and necessitating a response. Over evolutionary time, traditions have offered avenues for addressing hazards, plausibly resulting in linkages between orientations toward tradition and orientations toward danger. Emerging research documents connections between traditionalism and threat responsivity, including pathogen-avoidance motivations. Additionally, because hazard-mitigating behaviors can conflict with competing priorities, associations between traditionalism and pathogen avoidance may hinge on contextually contingent tradeoffs. The COVID-19 pandemic provides a real-world test of the posited relationship between traditionalism and hazard avoidance. Across 27 societies (N = 7844), we find that, in a majority of countries, individuals’ endorsement of tradition positively correlates with their adherence to costly COVID-19-avoidance behaviors; accounting for some of the conflicts that arise between public health precautions and other objectives further strengthens this evidence that traditionalism is associated with greater attention to hazards.

Accordance and conflict between religious and scientific precautions against COVID-19 in 27 societies

“…In prior work using the same sample as the current study (Samore et al, 2023), we found that greater traditionalism tended to correlate with taking more public health precautions. This finding is consistent with the hypothesis that greater sensitivity to threats-including pathogen threats-is associated with greater traditionalism, given that practicing the tried-and-true may have threat-mitigating benefits.…”

“…The cultural environment is likely to shape the perception of conflicts between religion and science, in part as a function of dynamics such as information environments (e.g., rhetoric from faith or scientific leaders, or from news media or political figures), the particularities of different faith traditions, and historical path dependencies. These same dynamics apply to the COVID-19 pandemic, where individuals' perceptions of the costs, benefits, and tradeoffs of various precautions varied widely (Samore et al, 2023), likely structuring cross-culturally variant perceptions of conflict or compatibility between religious and public health precautions.…”

“…These additional relationships further illuminate the cost-benefit tradeoffs of precautionary behaviors, and highlight the importance of decomposing threat-mitigation motivations into multiple domains with complex interactions. A large literature connects threat-avoidance motivations generallyand pathogen-avoidance motivations in particular-to individuals' preferences for traditional values and norms, such that those who strongly embrace tradition are more likely to engage in threat-mitigating behaviors (Claessens et al, 2020;Jost et al, 2009;Murray & Schaller, 2012;Samore et al, 2023;Tybur et al, 2016). The traditional norms account (Tybur et al, 2016) provides a functionalist explanation for this relationship, hypothesizing that traditional norms may have culturally evolved to consistently reduce the costs of certain recurrent threats.…”

“…The traditional norms account (Tybur et al, 2016) provides a functionalist explanation for this relationship, hypothesizing that traditional norms may have culturally evolved to consistently reduce the costs of certain recurrent threats. Several mutually compatible functional mechanisms could explain why adherence to traditions would have these threat-mitigating properties, in turn leading more threat-sensitive individuals to endorse traditionalism (see Samore et al [2023] for discussion).…”

“…Having previously found a positive correlation between COVID-19 public health precautions and traditionalism (Samore et al, 2023), we next assessed potential associations between COVID-19 religious precautions and traditionalism. If traditional people tend to perceive less conflict with religious precautions than with public health precautions, then the overall relationship between traditionalism and pathogen avoidance ought to be stronger for the former.…”