Closed-minded individuals were less likely to adhere to COVID-19 preventive behaviors, such as physical distancing, according to new research that examined data collected from 17 countries. The study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, provides evidence that analytic thinking styles were more important than political ideology in predicting behaviors during the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.
On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared the outbreak of SARS‐CoV‐2 to be a global pandemic. Governments around the world urged people to follow preventive health measures such as frequent hand washing and staying at least six feet away from others. The authors of the new study sought to investigate why some people refused to adhere to these measures.
“One area of our research interest is the role of ideological factors and analytic thinking in various aspects of our daily lives,” said Marina Maglić of the Institute of Social Sciences Ivo Pilar, the corresponding author of the study. “The COVID-19 pandemic is a global crisis affecting all major aspects of human life, and there is a wide range of factors at play in reasoning about it. As such, it has the potential to inform some of the basic questions in the social sciences.”
“In the presented research, we focused on the role of analytic thinking and political ideology, factors that have been shown to affect reasoning regarding many contested issues, such as climate change, embryonic stem cell research, evolution theory etc. Thus, we wanted to investigate how it may translate to the issue of preventive behavior and policy support in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
For their study, the researchers analyzed data from 12,490 participants from 17 countries: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, Greece, Iraq, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Nigeria, New Zealand, Pakistan, Poland, Singapore, Slovakia, and the USA. Data was collected during April and May 2020.
The participants reported their political orientation, adherence to COVID-19 preventive behaviors, and their level of belief in conspiracy theories about COVID-19. They also completed a self-reported assessment of open-mindedness and completed the Cognitive Reflection Test, which contains questions that tend to generate quick and intuitive — but incorrect — answers.
The researchers found open-mindedness was a substantially stronger predictor of adherence to COVID-19 preventive behaviors than political orientation. Those who agreed with statements such as “If I do not know much about some topic, I don’t mind being taught about it, even if I know about other topics” were more likely to report avoiding physical contact with others, maintaining physical hygiene, and supporting COVID-19 restrictive mitigation policies. In contrast, those who agreed with statements such as “I think that paying attention to people who disagree with me is a waste of time” were less likely to adhere to COVID-19 preventive behaviors.
“During the first stages of the worldwide crisis, individuals who tend to recognize the limitations of their own knowledge and who are open to new information and evidence were more inclined to adhere to preventive measures and support COVID-19 policies, regardless of their political orientation,” Maglić told PsyPost. “Also, there is some evidence that having an open-minded outlook can also help in dealing with various ‘contaminated’ and distorted information suggested by other research, and in our case, specifically conspiracy theories.”
“Namely, less open-minded individuals were less likely to practice physical distancing and were less supportive of restrictive COVID-19 policies partly due to their support for COVID-19 conspiracy theories as well. Taken together with other research, these findings provide evidence that open-minded thinkers make more accurate judgments about risks and more evidence-based decisions under uncertainty across a broad range of issues, including health-related ones.”
But close-mindedness/open-mindedness is only one factor among many that influences pandemic-related behaviors, the researchers noted. For example, other research has found that having a heightened sense of entitlement is also associated with reduced compliance with COVID-19 preventive behaviors.
“Reasoning and judgment done in the highly uncertain context of a global pandemic and infodemic is a complex research topic,” Maglić explained. “In our research, we took the cognitive science lens to investigate psychological determinants of COVID-19 preventive behavior and policy support, focusing specifically on the role of reasoning and political ideology. But, needless to say, there are many other relevant factors at play, such as different critical reasoning abilities and dispositions, personality traits (e.g., anxiety), risk perception, trust (in science, media, government, etc.), morality-related and contextual factors (pandemic stage), to name just a few.”
“A growing body of insights from behavioral and social science should hopefully result in a comprehensive understanding of psychological and behavioral responses to the pandemic and thus provide tools for devising prevention and mitigation strategies tailored to a specific context in which they are to be implemented.”
“In our subsequent (not yet published) studies during different pandemic stages, we consistently find opened-minded thinking to play a relevant role in reasoning about the pandemic,” Maglić added. “We are looking forward to the accumulation of research findings that should inform health experts and policymakers in developing efficient policies and public health communication models.”
The study, “Analytic Thinking and Political Orientation in the Corona Crisis“, was authored by Marina Maglić, Tomislav Pavlović, and Renata Franc.
