Psychological Antecedents and Opportunities for Correcting Negative Attitudes towards COVID-19 Prevention Measures.

Abstract

The article examines the psychological antecedents and opportunities for correcting attitudes associated with the person’s rejection of COVID-19 prevention measures. The psychological factors that favor the appearance of such attitudes in a person are discussed. Three groups of these antecedents are distinguished, differing in terms of their place in the structure of the psyche and the degree of their stability during a person’s life: stable, relatively stable, dynamic. The group of stable psychological antecedents includes personality traits, cognitive/thinking style, personal values; into the group of relatively stable – worldview beliefs, science-related knowledge, peculiarities of the social self and group identity; into the group of dynamic ones – the psychological state, attitudes, and beliefs regarding the situation of the pandemic.Two main strategies for counteracting negative attitudes and beliefs a re highlighted: preventive (implemented even before the emergence of undesirable attitudes and the appearance of misinformation provoking their occurrence), reactive (carried out after the formation of negative attitudes and beliefs). Various options for implementing a preventive strategy are considered: limiting the spread of misinformation about COVID-19, preventing its refutation, and developing people’s skills to detect misinformation.The factors of the effectiveness of the reactive counteraction strategy are analyzed: the type of tactics used to correct negative attitudes, the characteristics of the source of misinformation about COVID-19, the structure of the refuting message, the frequency of repetition of misinformation, the time elapsed between its appearance and rebutting it, the degree and direction of the recipient’s cognitive activity, his/her views and beliefs.