Warmth and competence perceptions of key protagonists are associated with containment measures during the COVID-19 pandemic: Evidence from 35 countries

Abstract

It is crucial to understand why people comply with measures to contain viruses and their effects during pandemics. We provide evidence from 35 countries (Ntotal = 12,553) from 6 continents during the COVID-19 pandemic (between 2021 and 2022) obtained via cross-sectional surveys that the social perception of key protagonists on two basic dimensions—warmth and competence—plays a crucial role in shaping pandemic-related behaviors. Firstly, when asked in an open question format, heads of state, physicians, and protest movements were universally identified as key protagonists across countries. Secondly, multiple-group confirmatory factor analyses revealed that warmth and competence perceptions of these and other protagonists differed significantly within and between countries. Thirdly, internal meta-analyses showed that warmth and competence perceptions of heads of state, physicians, and protest movements were associated with support and opposition intentions, containment and prevention behaviors, as well as vaccination uptake. Our results have important implications for designing effective interventions to motivate desirable health outcomes and coping with future health crises and other global challenges.

Comparing Social Perceptions of Culturally Emic Protagonists Using the Stereotype Content Model

“…Only 42% (8 of 19) of the analyses of competence P3 revealed (partial) metric MI and 32% reached MI on scalar level or higher. This limited performance of competence P3 might be caused by the model structure that mainly consisted of three items only or the fact that competence scores for this protagonist were generally very low (for further information, see Friehs, Kotzur, Kraus, et al, 2022). It thus remains unclear whether the limited performance of competence is based on technical or conceptual causes.…”

“…As we did not use newly constructed emic scales but used the versatile dataset provided by Friehs, Kotzur, Kraus, et al (2022), the approach sensu Boehnke (2022) was not applied fully. We considered our items as emic because we referenced them to targets with culturally different meaning, but the items were originally created in the classical etic way with a focus on semantic equivalence.…”

“…The current study was pre-registered (Schemmerling et al, 2023a) and used a dataset taken from Friehs, Kotzur, Kraus, et al (2022), which is provided openly on OSF (see Schemmerling et al, 2023b). This project originally collected data in 35 countries asking participants to rate 12 different persons or groups ( protagonists ) related to the country’s COVID-19 pandemic on two SCM dimensions, warmth and competence.…”

“…The full item set and the corresponding translations can be found at https://osf.io/pvdqh/ (Schemmerling et al, 2023b). For details on scale construction, data acquisition, and preparation, see Friehs, Kotzur, Kraus, et al (2022).…”

“…We selected two of five English-speaking countries, the United States and the United Kingdom, to keep the number of countries per language equal throughout the study. The SCM originated in the United States and the items of Friehs, Kotzur, Kraus et al (2022) were originally developed in the United Kingdom.…”