Abstract
Cultural orientations in relation to individualism and collectivism produced by subsistence strategies can lead to a wide array of consequences for perception, cognition, and emotion. We predict that, as a result of different economic patterns, farmers with greater collectivism would show more compliance with COVID-19 precautionary behavior than herders with greater individualism. By adopting a “just minimal difference” approach, we compared Chinese farming and herding communities that share a national identity, ethnicity, and residential area but vary in their degree of individualism-collectivism. Consistent with our hypothesis, Study 1 found that farmers reported higher compliance with prevention initiatives than herders in self-report survey. Study 2 provided a behavioral choice confirmation of the observed relationship. The present research provides the empirical evidence that economic activities can have divergent effects on mitigation strategies in the COVID-19 fight, and these results have meaningful implications for socioecological psychology theory and for pandemic prevention and control.
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