Obligation or Desire: Variation in Motivation for Compliance With COVID-19 Public Health Guidance
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Issue Date
2021-07-06Author
Ai, Ting
Adams, Glenn E.
Zhao, Xian
Publisher
Frontiers Media
Type
Article
Article Version
Scholarly/refereed, publisher version
Rights
© 2021 Ai, Adams and Zhao. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY).
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Show full item recordAbstract
Why do people comply with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) public health guidance? This study considers cultural-psychological foundations of variation in beliefs about motivations for such compliance. Specifically, we focused on beliefs about two sources of prosocial motivation: desire to protect others and obligation to society. Across two studies, we observed that the relative emphasis on the desire to protect others (vs. the obligation to the community) as an explanation for compliance was greater in the United States settings associated with cultural ecologies of abstracted independence than in Chinese settings associated with cultural ecologies of embedded interdependence. We observed these patterns for explanations of psychological experience of both others (Study 1) and self (Study 2), and for compliance with mandates for both social distancing and face masks (Study 2). Discussion of results considers both practical implications for motivating compliance with public health guidance and theoretical implications for denaturalizing prevailing accounts of prosocial motivation.
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Citation
Ai T, Adams G and Zhao X (2021) Obligation or Desire: Variation in Motivation for Compliance With COVID-19 Public Health Guidance. Front. Psychol. 12:647830. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.647830
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