Abstract
Social distancing has become the most prominent measure many countries have implemented to combat the spread of COVID-19. The aim of the current study was to explore the potential role of empathy and self-construal styles, as individual personality traits, on self-reported social distancing. Participants completed the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (a multi-dimensional measure of trait-levels of empathy), the Singelis Self-Construal Scale (a measure of self-construal styles), and were asked to rate their level of social distancing and how much they endorsed social distancing on a five-point Likert-scale. Across a large and diverse sample (with participants collected from Canada, United Kingdom, Sweden, and United States; total n = 967), results showed that trait-levels of empathic concern (EC) and perspective taking (PT) positively correlates with social distancing. However, we did not find evidence to suggest that trait-levels of personal distress correlates with social distancing. We interpret these findings as suggesting that empathy, both its altruistic (EC) and cognitive (PT) dimensions, plays an important role in motivating people to socially distance and should be emphasized during times of crisis. Furthermore, we suggest that emphasizing a person’s self-distress during times of crisis may not be an effective approach in promotion social distancing policies (or other prosocial behaviors). We also found that both independence and interdependence self-construal styles positively correlates with social distancing. While we expected the latter result, we did not expect the former. This suggests that more work is needed to fully understand how self-construal styles, along with their cultural level analogs (i.e., Individualism-Collectivism), influences social distancing. Overall, these results provide us with novel multi-national data about the role of individual differences on social distancing tendencies specifically, and human behavior during a global health crisis more generally.
Highlights
Citing the alarming levels of spread and severity, on March 11th, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared COVID-19 as a pandemic1
Our analysis showed that empathic concern (EC) significantly and positively correlated with Social Distancing Behavior [rho = 0.17, p < 0.001, padjusted < 0.001, n = 947] and Belief [rho = 0.22, p < 0.001, padjusted < 0.001, n = 947]
The current study showed that perspective taking (PT) and EC, two different dimensions of trait-empathy, positively correlates with self-reported levels of social distancing behavior and belief; Personal Distress (PD), a measure of self-distress, did not
Summary
Citing the alarming levels of spread and severity, on March 11th, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared COVID-19 as a pandemic1 Even before this official declaration, governments and organizations around the world were already proposing various policy implementations to combat the spread of COVID-19, the most prolific being the promotion and regulation of social distancing. This has resulted in businesses such as bars and gyms closing, for markets to implement customer movement and distancing policies, for schools to switch to an online format, and in general, for people to stay home as much as possible. Social distancing is actively promoted by the WHO and various government bodies around the world, there appear to be individual differences in the extent to which people engage in social distancing behavior. An interesting and pertinent question is: what factors lead individuals to engage in social distancing behaviors? The current study addresses this issue by exploring the potential role of two factors on social distancing: empathy and self-construal style
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