Department of Psychology, University of Hildesheim, Hildesheim, Germany.
Psychol Health Med. 2022 Feb;27(2):325-332. doi: 10.1080/13548506.2021.1906435. Epub 2021 Mar 29.
People have a fair idea of how they are supposed to behave to slow down the spread of COVID-19. But what about people's perception of their own compared to others' adherence to the guidelines? Building on prior research on self-enhancement biases, we predicted that people perceive themselves to adhere more strictly to the COVID-19 guidelines than others. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a large-scale online experiment (N = 1,102), using a sample from four countries (UK, US, Germany, Sweden). As predicted, people perceived themselves to adhere to the COVID-19 guidelines more strictly than both the average citizen of their country and their close friends. These findings were robust across countries. Furthermore, findings were not moderated by whether people first thought about themselves or about others. In conclusion, our study provides a robust demonstration of how a long-standing psychological effect perseveres, even during a once-in-a-lifetime health crisis.
人们对如何减缓 COVID-19 的传播有一个大致的了解。但是，人们对自己与他人遵守指南的看法如何呢？基于先前关于自我增强偏见的研究，我们预测人们认为自己比其他人更严格地遵守 COVID-19 指南。为了验证这一假设，我们进行了一项大规模的在线实验（N=1102），样本来自四个国家（英国、美国、德国、瑞典）。正如预测的那样，人们认为自己比自己国家的普通公民和亲密朋友更严格地遵守 COVID-19 指南。这些发现是稳健的，跨越了不同的国家。此外，研究结果不受人们是先想到自己还是他人的影响。总之，我们的研究有力地证明了一种长期存在的心理效应是如何持续存在的，即使是在一生中只有一次的健康危机期间。
