As the world continues to grapple with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, researchers are trying to understand what factors predict individual adherence to precautionary measures such as mask-wearing and social distancing. A recent study published in Scientific Reports examined the influence of cultural values on COVID-19 precautionary behaviors across 27 different societies. The findings revealed a strong association between traditionalism and adherence to precautionary measures, suggesting that cultural values play a crucial role in individual responses to public health crises. This article will delve deeper into the study and explore its implications for COVID-19 prevention strategies.
Traditionalism is a phenomenon that is seen in individuals who embrace and adhere to longstanding norms and values of their group while rejecting changes to them. This tendency varies across individuals and has important downstream consequences, including the ability to coordinate actions with fellow group members, the shaping of political attitudes and ideologies, and the tendency to embrace or reject innovations in the face of environmental change. Therefore, it is essential to understand the factors that contribute to variation in traditionalism.
Recent research has indicated associations between individual differences in traditionalism and the propensity to attend and respond to hazards. The evidence suggests that individual variation in traditionalism may associate with variation in pathogen avoidance, the motivation to take actions to alleviate the costs of potential pathogen threats. The traditional norms account identifies pathogen avoidance as an important factor relating to traditionalism.
There are a few evolutionary pathways that may lead individuals to leverage adherence to tradition as a way of ameliorating danger. Firstly, some traditions may have instrumental value for addressing pathogen threats. Secondly, adherence to traditional norms might provide broad payoffs via increased social support. Co-evolution may have resulted in psychological adaptations or reaction norms connecting traditions to threat if the cost-benefit structure was common over evolutionary time.
Adherence to tradition can provide benefits, but it can also entail costs. There are often tangible costs to sticking to tried-and-true methods, as innovations may generate higher payoffs than existing practices. Any given manifestation of a linkage between threat-mitigating behavior and traditionalism may depend on how individuals assign weights to the cost-benefit structure characterizing the specific context. Additionally, behaviors that mitigate the costs of a threat may lead to costs in other areas, either directly or indirectly due to the zero-sum nature of the time, attention, and resources available.
Past research predominantly employs samples from a narrow range of societies. Given that cost-benefit structures are likely culturally variant, the observed associations between traditionalism and pathogen avoidance may be rooted in aspects of particular practices, values, or beliefs within those societies. Therefore, the extent to which traditionalism and threat-avoidance behaviors are related across the highly variable traditional practices and beliefs of diverse societies is not fully known.
The COVID-19 pandemic affords an opportunity to further understand the relationship between traditionalism and pathogen avoidance in a real-world context. The pandemic involves a pathogen threat that is both salient for much of the world’s population and has had marked effects on behavior. Further, these real-world behaviors are inherently costly, and may epitomize the kinds of cost-benefit tradeoffs individuals face when various priorities are perceived to clash. Moreover, individuals are influenced by their information environments, which can in turn shape perceptions of costs and benefits regardless of the actual underlying distribution.
The traditional norms account of the relationship between traditionalism and threat avoidance predicts that COVID-19 health behaviors should correlate with traditionalism, given that such behaviors can accurately index general pathogen avoidance motivations by virtue of occurring in a real-world context. However, group-level and individual-level contextual factors may parochially shape the perceived cost-benefit structure of COVID-19 health precautions, making it challenging to draw straightforward conclusions.
In conclusion, traditionalism is an individual tendency that has important downstream consequences, including the ability to coordinate actions with fellow group members, the shaping of political attitudes and ideologies, and the tendency to embrace or reject innovations in the face of environmental change. Understanding the factors that contribute to variation in traditionalism is vital. The COVID-19 pandemic is an opportunity to further understand the relationship between traditionalism and pathogen avoidance in a real-world context, but group-level and individual-level contextual factors may complicate the analysis.
