Who wants to reopen the economy during the COVID-19 pandemic? The daring and uncaring

Abstract

Economic shutdowns, which refer to disallowing employees to work on site, are among the most contentious approaches to reduce the spread of COVID-19. While economic shutdowns save lives, their large economic costs have caused some people to develop strong attitudes and even break government-issued mandates, which incurs health risks and often the need to extend the economic shutdowns. In the current article, we argue that the interaction of two personality characteristics, risk-taking tendencies and prosocial tendencies, is a strong determinant of attitudes toward economic shutdowns, and we assess the impact of this interaction on three different attitudes toward economic shutdowns that differ by their focal target: employees, customers, and organizations. The results demonstrate that this interaction significantly predicted economic shutdown attitudes toward customers and organizations but not employees. We suggest that these results can be understood via the lens of behavioral decision-making theories as well as a recent framework on antisocial risk takers, both of which provide several subsequent directions for future research. We conclude with recommendations for the development of effective messages to curb defiant behaviors toward economic shutdowns, such as focusing on those most likely to perform these problematic behaviors – the daring and uncaring.

Perceptive Risk Clusters of European Citizens and NPI Compliance in Face of the COVID-19 Pandemics

“…Do et al (2017) have argued that risk-taking and prosocial tendencies are two inherently intertwined personality dimensions, and that high risk-taking behavior and low social tendency may lead to negate all social protective behaviors. We find evidence of this in the segmentation results, in line with other recent surveys (Howard, 2020).…”

“…Given the segments found, and the importance of risk and social profiling, we now analyze whether those segments may explain differences in NPIs compliance, extending some of the findings by e.g. Howard (2020). Table 5 reports the regression results of linking individual RTC' value to the 10 segments for the three most important actions reported to significantly reduce the reproduction rate of the covid-19 pandemics, that is: social distancing, quarantine, and hygiene (see Bo et al, 2020).…”

“…In another study, Kamenidou et al (2020) find cohesive segments in the Greek population in their compliance with NPIs. Here, we use as well clustering techniques, but we include not only diverse forms of risk perception, but also, social orientations, in consistency with the neuroscience literature of people traits (Do et al, 2017, andHoward 2020).…”

Individualism and Egalitarianism Can Kill: How Cultural Values Predict Coronavirus Deaths Across the Globe

“…Our findings validate what Elgar et al (2020) propose that some dimensions of social capital, such as caring for the community, lead to fewer deaths. Other research found that higher prosocial tendencies were related to an acceptance of making sacrifices such as accepting a temporary economic lockdown (Howard, 2021). While reiterating that cultural values influence how communities react to and behave in this pandemic [see also Seale et al (2020)], our findings indicate that people who care primarily for themselves and have less regard for the consequences of their actions on others behave in ways that are related to personal gain, convenience, and enjoyment, which may increase exposure and risk to the virus.…”

Cross-Cultural Bayesian Network Analysis of Factors Affecting Residents’ Concerns About the Spread of an Infectious Disease Caused by Tourism

“…However, their study also indicated that a younger and unmarried segment with a drinking and smoking habit coming from lower-income households had a reluctant tendency to accord with the recommendations issued by the authorities. Lower engagement in implementing the measures on the COVID-19 were also observed among specific personality traits, among others risk taking traits ( Howard, 2021 ), antisocial risk takers ( Zajenkowski et al, 2020 ), anti-social traits ( Miguel et al, 2020 ), and dark triad trait ( Nowak et al, 2020 ) in various cultural contexts.…”