Reactance, morality, and disgust: the relationship between affective dispositions and compliance with official health recommendations during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT

Emergency situations require individuals to make important changes in their behaviour. In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, official recommendations to avoid the spread of the virus include costly behaviours such as self-quarantining or drastically diminishing social contacts. Compliance (or lack thereof) with these recommendations is a controversial and divisive topic, and lay hypotheses abound regarding what underlies this divide. This paper investigates which cognitive, moral, and emotional traits separate people who comply with official recommendations from those who don’t. In four studies (three pre-registered) on both U.S. and French samples, we found that individuals’ self-reported compliance with official recommendations during the COVID-19 pandemic was partly driven by individual differences in moral values, disgust sensitivity, and psychological reactance. We discuss the limitations of our studies and suggest possible applications in the context of health communication.

KEYWORDS:

• Reactance
• morality
• disgust
• coronavirus
• COVID-19

Acknowledgements

This work was funded by a SNSF Eccellenza Professorial Fellowship grant attributed to Florian Cova for his project “Eudaimonic emotions and the (meta-)philosophy of well-being” (181083).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Our selection of traits was based on two priors pilot studies conducted respectively on March 13th and March 16th (see osf.io/497s2/ and osf.io/t93ms/). These pilot studies led us to exclude the following predictors: need for uniqueness, trust in personal experience, scientific literacy, cognitive reflection test, state and trait anxiety. These predictors were excluded because they did not significantly predict participants’ intention to comply with health recommendations.

2 Although perspective-taking could be considered a cognitive factor, we include it in this section because, in the context of our argument, it is arguably more relevant to moral (care) concerns than belief-formation processes. Moreover, Davis’ perspective-taking subscales is not only about the ability to take the perspective of others, but mostly about the motivation and willingness to take every perspective into account (e.g. “Before criticizing somebody, I try to imagine how I would feel if I were in their place”, “I believe that there are two sides to every question and try to look at them both.”) As such, it is also a measure of how important it is to people to take others’ perspectives into account when making a decision.

3 One might wonder why Perspective taking and Empathic concern are separated into different categories (Moral vs. Emotional dispositions) given that they are highly correlated and sometimes co-activated. The reason is as follows. While the “empathic concern” scale clearly measures a certain kind of emotional reaction (e.g. “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me”, “Sometimes I don't feel very sorry for other people when they are having problems”), the perspective taking scale seems to measure a certain strategy and interest in taking others’ perspective into account (e.g. “Before criticizing somebody, I try to imagine how I would feel if I were in their place.”, “I believe that there are two sides to every question and try to look at them both.”). So, it is clear that we are dealing with two different constructs, even though they are correlated.

4 For discussion regarding the internal consistency of MFQ variables, see Tamul et al. (2020, April 7, p. 5–6), but also Graham et al. (2011, p. 370).

5 In contrast to Studies 1a and 1b, we did not include the two Liberty foundations in our measures of moral values. There were two reasons for this decision: First, existing French version of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire does not include the two Liberty foundations. Second, the internal coherence of the Liberty foundations in Studies 1a and 1b was very low.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Eccellenza Professorial Fellowship grant attributed to Florian Cova for his project “Eudaimonic emotions and the (meta-)philosophy of well-being” [Grant Number 181083].