Traditionalism, pathogen avoidance, and competing tradeoffs during a global pandemic

Theo Samore

University of Otago

Individuals vary in the extent to which they embrace their society’s traditions, as well as in the perception of threats as salient and necessitating mitigation. Traditionalism and threat sensitivity may be linked if—over evolutionary time—traditions offered avenues for reliably addressing threats, either through instrumental and/or ritual and cooperative benefits. Alternatively, if traditionalists are attuned to group-destabilizing threats, they may also exhibit greater threat sensitivity in certain domains. These possibilities – which are not mutually exclusive – suggest that greater traditionalism may associate with stronger mitigating responses toward some threats. However, threat-avoidance motivations can conflict with competing priorities and epistemic commitments in the real world. The COVID-19 pandemic represented a moment in time in which people across the world undertook costly threat-mitigating behaviors, providing an important test of the traditionalism-threat avoidance relationship under complex real-world conditions. We investigated the relationship between COVID-19 precautions, traditionalism, and perceptions of competing tradeoffs in both the U.S. and a large 27-country cross-cultural sample. Results indicated that, across study sites, traditionalism tended to positively correlate with behaviors intended to mitigate the threat of COVID-19. Further, despite possible epistemic conflict between religion and science, individuals tended to report engaging in both scientifically and religiously rooted precautions. Nevertheless, at some study sites, the relationship between public health precautions and traditionalism was suppressed by competing priorities, such as lower trust in scientists and greater concerns about personal liberties.