As of August 2020, more than 20 million people worldwide have been infected by the new coronavirus and more than 735,000 have died, making the COVID-19 pandemic one of the greatest health crises of the last 100 years. Until a vaccine or effective medical treatment is developed, the public response to the current pandemic is largely limited to policy-making and collective behavior change (Lewnard & Lo, 2020). To reduce virus transmission it is crucial that people engage in public health behavior (e.g., maintain spatial distance and improve physical hygiene) and support COVID-19 protective policies (e.g., limiting travel and closing bars and restaurants). Indeed, the Director of the World Health Organization recently argued: “That’s why behavioural science is so important – it helps us to understand how people make decisions, so we can support them to make the best decisions for their health” (WHO, 2020). In the current investigation, we respond to this call for behavioural science and present the results from a global study across 67 countries, testing key predictors of public health support.
What drives people to support the large-scale public health initiatives mentioned above? Answering this question may help countries, health organizations, and political leaders design effective interventions to increase compliance with actions like maintaining spatial distance and restricting travel (Van Bavel et al., 2020). Governments and political leaders can coordinate individuals and help them avoid behaviors no longer considered socially responsible. However, recent evidence suggests this type of leadership requires cultivating a shared sense that ‘we are all in this together’ to promote adherence with recommended health behaviors (Haslam et al., 2011; Martinez-Brawley & Gualda, 2020). For instance, Identifying with a group is associated with mutual cooperation and adherence to norms (e.g., Brewer, 1999; Buchan et al., 2011; De Cremer & Van Vugt, 1999), motivation to help other members of their group (Ellemers, Spears, & Doosje, 1999; Levine, Prosser, Evans, & Reicher, 2005) and willingness to engage in collectively-oriented actions aimed at improving the group’s welfare (Bilewicz & Wójcik, 2010; Klandermans, 2002; Tajfel, 1978; van Zomeren et al., 2008). We reasoned that national identities might play a key role in promoting public health in the current pandemic (see Van Bavel et al., 2020).
National identification is defined as the personal significance that being part of a nation holds for an individual (Cameron, 2004; Leach et al., 2008; Postmes et al., 2012; Tajfel, 1978). Prior work has found that national identity plays an important role in motivating people to engage in costly behavior that benefits other members of their national community (Kalin & Sambanis, 2018) and greater civic involvement (Huddy & Khatib, 2007). Accordingly, a strong sense of shared national identity might help promote collective efforts to combat the pandemic within one’s country (e.g., Dovidio, Ikizer, Kunst, & Levy, 2020). Moreover, border closures, travel bans, and national task forces have likely made national identities even more salient during the pandemic (Bieber, 2020). The existence and activation of strong collective identities can allow political leaders to mobilize the masses to overcome collective action problems. For instance, political leaders and public health officials often foster a sense that “we are in this together” and can manage the crisis through collective action (Gkinopoulos & Hegarty, 2018; van Zomeren et al., 2008). As such, one way to promote public health support during this pandemic might be to leverage a sense of shared national identity to promote public health behavior and public policy to minimize the spread of the virus (Haslam, 2020; Haslam & Reicher, 2006).
However, recent work in the United States has found that threats to strong national identity can lead to less support for public health initiatives, making this question important to investigate at a global scale (Kachanoff et al., 2020). The goal of the current paper is to examine whether national identification could explain adherence to the collective behavior change needed to fight COVID-19 (Jetten et al., 2020). We examined the associations between the strength of identification with one’s nation and whether people adopted public health behaviors (e.g., spatial distancing, hand washing) and endorsed public policy interventions (e.g., closing bars and restaurants). Prior work suggests these actions could substantially reduce the number of COVID-19 infections (Block et al., 2020; Ferguson, 2006; Koo et al., 2020; Lewnard & Lo, 2020). The general hypothesis was that people who identify strongly with their nation will, on average, express stronger public health support than those who identify less with their nation. We assumed this would be a global phenomenon so we examined this relationship in 67 countries around the world.
Feelings of social identification are distinct from glorification of a group (Roccas, Klar, & Liviatan, 2006). The latter can be measured by national narcissism: a belief in the greatness of one’s nation that is unappreciated by others (Golec de Zavala, Cichocka, Eidelson, & Jayawickreme, 2009). National identification tends to correlate positively with national narcissism, because they both assume a positive evaluation of one’s nation. However, they predict different outcomes. For example, outgroup prejudice is negatively associated with national identification but positively with national narcissism (Golec de Zavala, Cichocka, & Bilewicz, 2013). National narcissism also predicts concern for maintaining a positive image of the nation than for the well-being of fellow citizens (Cichocka, 2016; Cislak et al., 2018; Marchlewska et al., 2020). Thus, national narcissists may be less inclined to engage in behaviours to prevent the spread of COVID-19 (Nowak et al., 2020). Therefore, in predicting compliance with public health measures, we distinguished the effects of national identification from those of national narcissism.
There is some evidence that both national identification (e.g., van der Toorn, Nail, Liviatan & Jost, 2014) and national narcissism (e.g., Cichocka, Marchlewska, Golec de Zavala, & Olechowski, 2016; Cislak et al., 2018; Marchlewska, Cichocka, Panayiotou, Castellanos, & Batayneh, 2018) are positively associated with right-wing political ideology. Further, there is emerging evidence that political ideology played a role in individual responses to the pandemic: right-leaning individuals or conservatives (at least in the US) tended to downplay risks associated with COVID-19 (e.g., Calvillo et al., 2020; Capraro & Barcelo, 2020; Sjåstad & Van Bavel, 2020) and were less likely to comply with preventative measures compared to left-leaning or liberal individuals (van Holm et al., 2020; Capraro & Barcelo, 2020). For that reason, we differentiated effects of national identification and narcissism from those of self-reported political ideology in the current study.