Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

12-2023

Abstract

People vary both in their embrace of their society’s traditions, and in their perception of hazards as salient and necessitating a response. Over evolutionary time, traditions have offered avenues for addressing hazards, plausibly resulting in linkages between orientations toward tradition and orientations toward danger. Emerging research documents connections between traditionalism and threat responsivity, including pathogen-avoidance motivations. Additionally, because hazard-mitigating behaviors can conflict with competing priorities, associations between traditionalism and pathogen avoidance may hinge on contextually contingent tradeoffs. The COVID-19 pandemic provides a real-world test of the posited relationship between traditionalism and hazard avoidance. Across 27 societies (N = 7844), we find that, in a majority of countries, individuals’ endorsement of tradition positively correlates with their adherence to costly COVID-19-avoidance behaviors; accounting for some of the conflicts that arise between public health precautions and other objectives further strengthens this evidence that traditionalism is associated with greater attention to hazards.

Keywords

COVID-19, motivation, public health, pandemics

Discipline

Applied Behavior Analysis | Public Health | Social Psychology

Research Areas

Psychology

Publication

Scientific Reports

Volume

13

Issue

1

First Page

1

Last Page

13

ISSN

2045-2322

Identifier

10.1038/s41598-023-29655-0

Publisher

Nature Research

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Comments

Full list of authors: Theodore Samore, Daniel M.T. Fessler, Adam Maxwell Sparks, Colin Holbrook, Lene Aarøe, Carmen Gloria Baeza, María Teresa Barbato, Pat Barclay, Renatas Berniūnas, Jorge Contreras‑Garduño, Bernardo Costa‑Neves, Maria del Pilar Grazioso, Pınar Elmas, Peter Fedor, Ana Maria Fernandez, Regina Fernández‑Morales, Leonel Garcia‑Marques, Paulina Giraldo‑Perez, Pelin Gul, Fanny Habacht, Youssef Hasan, Earl John Hernandez, Tomasz Jarmakowski, Shanmukh Kamble, Tatsuya Kameda, Bia Kim, Tom R. Kupfer, Maho Kurita, Norman P. Li, Junsong Lu, Francesca R. Luberti, MaríaAndrée Maegli, Marinés Mejia, Coby Morvinski, Aoi Naito, Alice Ng’ang’a, Angélica Nascimento de Oliveira, Daniel N. Posner, Pavol Prokop, Yaniv Shani, Walter Omar Paniagua Solorzano, Stefan Stieger, Angela Oktavia Suryani, Lynn K. L. Tan, Joshua M. Tybur, Hugo Viciana, Amandine Visine, Jin Wang & Xiao‑Tian Wang

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-29655-0

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