Colarelli Stephen M, Mirando Tyler J, Han Kyunghee, Li Norman P, Vespi Carter, Klein Katherine A, Fales Charles P
Department of Psychology, Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant, USA.
School of Social Science, Singapore Management University, Singapore, Singapore.
Evol Psychol Sci. 2022 Dec 15:1-11. doi: 10.1007/s40806-022-00348-7.
Responses to COVID-19 public health interventions have been lukewarm. For example, only 64% of the US population has received at least two vaccinations. Because most public health interventions require people to behave in ways that are evolutionarily novel, evolutionary psychological theory and research on mismatch theory, the behavioral immune system, and individual differences can help us gain a better understanding of how people respond to public health information. Primary sources of threat information during the pandemic (particularly in early phases) were geographic differences in morbidity and mortality statistics. We argue that people are unlikely to respond to this type of evolutionarily novel information, particularly under conditions of high uncertainty. However, because individual differences affect threat perceptions, some individual differences will be associated with threat responses. We conducted two studies (during Phase 1 and 2 years later), using data from primarily public sources. We found that state-level COVID-19 morbidity and mortality rates had no relationship with mental health symptoms (an early indicator of how people were responding to the pandemic), suggesting that people-in general-were not attending to this type of information. This result is consistent with the evolutionary psychological explanation that statistical information is likely to have a weak effect on the behavioral immune system. We also found that individual differences (neuroticism, IQ, age, and political ideology) affected how people responded to COVID-19 threats, supporting a niche-picking explanation. We conclude with suggestions for future research and suggestions for improving interventions and promoting greater compliance.
对新冠疫情公共卫生干预措施的反应一直不温不火。例如，美国只有64%的人口接种了至少两剂疫苗。由于大多数公共卫生干预措施要求人们以在进化上新颖的方式行事，进化心理学理论以及关于错配理论、行为免疫系统和个体差异的研究可以帮助我们更好地理解人们如何应对公共卫生信息。疫情期间（尤其是在早期阶段）威胁信息的主要来源是发病率和死亡率统计数据的地域差异。我们认为，人们不太可能对这类进化上新颖的信息做出反应，尤其是在高度不确定的情况下。然而，由于个体差异会影响威胁感知，一些个体差异将与威胁反应相关联。我们进行了两项研究（在第一阶段以及两年后的第二阶段），主要使用来自公共来源的数据。我们发现，州一级的新冠发病率和死亡率与心理健康症状（人们对疫情反应的一个早期指标）没有关系，这表明一般来说人们没有关注这类信息。这一结果与进化心理学的解释一致，即统计信息可能对行为免疫系统影响微弱。我们还发现，个体差异（神经质、智商、年龄和政治意识形态）影响了人们对新冠威胁的反应，支持了利基选择的解释。我们最后提出了对未来研究的建议以及改进干预措施和促进更高依从性的建议。
