Abstract
With much unknown about the new coronavirus, the scientific consensus is that human hosts are crucial to its spread and reproduction—the more people behave like regular socializing beings they are, the more likely it is that the virus will propagate. Hence, many nations worldwide have mandated physical-distancing measures. In the current preregistered research, we focus on examining two factors that may help explain differences in adherence to COVID-19 preventive behaviors and policy support across different countries—political orientation and analytic thinking. We positioned our research within the dual-process framework of human reasoning and investigated the role of cognitive reflection, open-minded thinking, and political ideology in determining COVID-19 responsible behavior (physical distancing and maintaining hygiene) and support for restrictive COVID-19 policies on a sample of 12,490 participants from 17 countries. We have not been able to detect substantial relationships of political orientation with preventive behaviors and policy support, and overall found no reliable evidence of politicization, nor polarization regarding the issue. The results of structural equation modeling showed that the inclination towards COVID-19 preventive measures and their endorsement were defined primarily by the tendency of open-minded thinking. Specifically, open-minded thinking was shown to be a predictor of all three criteria—avoiding physical contact, maintaining physical hygiene, and supporting COVID-19 restrictive mitigation policies. Cognitive reflection was predictive of lesser adherence to stricter hygiene and only very weakly predictive of lesser policy support. Furthermore, there was no evidence of these effects varying across political contexts. The mediation analysis suggested a partial mediation effect of COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs on the relationships of open-mindedness and cognitive reflection with physical distancing (but not adherence to stricter hygiene) and COVID-19 policy support, albeit very small and significant primarily due to sample size. There was also no evidence of these effects varying across political contexts. Finally, we have not been able to find strong evidence of political orientation modifying the relationship between analytical thinking and COVID-19 behaviors and policy support, although we explored the pattern of these effects in the US and Canadian samples for exploratory purposes and comparison with other similar studies.
Highlights
Public Response to the COVID-19Pandemic—Preventive Behaviors and Policy SupportThe COVID-19 pandemic is a global health crisis affecting all major aspects of human life—political, social, economic, and psychological
This section summarizes the results of conducted analyses and reflects the order of posed research questions, while the results of confirmatory factor analyses, indicating construct validity of our variables, are presented in Supplementary Material, as well as descriptive data and intercorrelations among latent factor scores of outcome variables, open-mindedness and conspiracy beliefs, and manifest variables: simple sum scores of cognitive reflection test (CRT), political ideology and sex and age
For all three outcome measures, the correlations in a majority of the countries did not exceed 0.10, and, where they did, they were below 0.20 in magnitude, i.e., relatively small (Gignac and Szodorai, 2016). This suggests that, there appeared to be some variation across countries, COVID-19 preventive behaviors and policy support were largely unpoliticized at the time when the survey was conducted
Summary
Public Response to the COVID-19Pandemic—Preventive Behaviors and Policy SupportThe COVID-19 pandemic is a global health crisis affecting all major aspects of human life—political, social, economic, and psychological. Responsible preventive behaviors guided by reliable information were paramount in combating COVID-19. Public health response is not uniform, and preventive measures, such as physical distancing, self-isolating, and maintaining good hygiene, can hardly be implemented by coercion alone. Preventive behaviors can be broadly categorized into two types: spatial distancing and stricter hygiene. Many studies (e.g., Alper et al, 2020; Harper et al, 2020; Plohl and Musil, 2020; Qian and Yahara, 2020; Raude et al, 2020) used composite measures of multiple types of preventive behaviors, several studies demonstrated that spatial distancing and stricter hygiene represent distinct types of preventive behaviors with different correlates (Wismans et al, 2020; van Mulukom et al, 2021)
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