Abstract
In the global crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries attempt to enforce new social norms to prevent the further spread of the coronavirus. A key to the success of these measures is the individual adherence to norms that are collectively beneficial to contain the spread of the pandemic. However, individuals’ self-interest bias (i.e., the prevalent tendency to license own but not others’ self-serving acts or norm violations) can pose a challenge to the success of such measures. The current research examines COVID-19-related self-interest bias from a cross-cultural perspective. Two studies ( N = 1,558) sampled from the United States and China consistently revealed that participants from the United States evaluated their own self-serving acts (exploiting test kits in Study 1; social gathering and sneezing without covering the mouth in public in Study 2) as more acceptable than identical deeds of others, while such self-interest bias did not emerge among Chinese participants. Cultural underpinnings of independent versus interdependent self-construal may influence the extent to which individuals apply self-interest bias to justifications of their own self-serving behaviors during the pandemic.
Highlights
The novel Coronavirus Disease has become an unprecedented global epidemic, and has urged tremendous changes to politics, economics, and ordinary people’s daily life
Self-interest bias has been established in evaluating various norm violations such as breaking the speed limit to make an appointment on time (Lammers et al, 2010) or keeping too much change received from a cashier (Weiss et al, 2018)
We plotted participants’ moral acceptability judgments of COVID-19-related self-serving behaviors, enacted by themselves versus strange others. It seemed that people from the United States demonstrated more self-interest bias than participants from China, for their exploitation of both test kits and disinfectants
Summary
The novel Coronavirus Disease (below as COVID-19) has become an unprecedented global epidemic, and has urged tremendous changes to politics, economics, and ordinary people’s daily life. How do people from the United States versus China evaluate their own COVID-19-related self-serving acts as compared to those of others?. The current research investigates this self-interest bias in people’s judgments of own as compared to others’ COVID-19-related self-serving behaviors. In terms of COVID-19related behaviors, in particular, people use their knowledge about social norms to evaluate the moral wrongness of others’ violations (Andrews et al, 2020; Habersaat et al, 2020), but the decision-making dynamics can be more complicated when it comes to complying with COVID19 guidelines themselves. People often consider themselves as more unique, superior, and privileged as compared to general others (Haslam et al, 2005; Lammers et al, 2010; Weiss et al, 2018), and these perceptions can motivate people to justify their own but not others’ COVID-19-related self-serving behaviors. We hypothesize that: Hypothesis 1: People’s own self-serving behaviors against others’ interest or public norms will be more likely to be viewed as justified than identical deeds of others
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