ORCID Profile
0000-0002-6666-493X
Current Organisation
University of Tokyo
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Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 09-07-2022
Abstract: People vary in the extent to which they embrace their society’s traditions, impacting a range of social and political phenomena. People also vary in the degree to which they perceive disparate dangers as salient and necessitating a response. Over evolutionary time, traditions likely regularly offered direct and indirect avenues for addressing hazards consequently, via multiple possible pathways, orientations toward tradition and toward danger may have become associated. Emerging research documents connections between in idual differences in traditionalism and variation in threat responsivity in general, and pathogen-avoidance motivations in particular. Importantly, because threat-mitigating behaviors can conflict with competing priorities, the precise associations between traditionalism and pathogen avoidance likely depend on contextually contingent costs and benefits. The COVID-19 pandemic requires in iduals to make decisions about consequential and costly pathogen-avoidance behaviors that can clash with other priorities. The pandemic therefore provides a real-world setting in which to test the posited relationship between traditionalism and pathogen avoidance across socio-political contexts. Across 27 societies (N = 7,844), we find that costly COVID-19-avoidance behaviors positively correlate with greater endorsement of traditional norms and values in a majority of countries. Accounting for the conflict that arises in some societies between public health precautions and competing priorities, such as the exercise of personal liberties, reveals a consistent relationship between traditionalism and COVID-19 precautions across an even wider range of social and cultural contexts. These findings support the thesis that traditionalism is associated with an enhanced tendency to attend to hazards.
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 03-07-2023
Abstract: Meaning-making systems underlie perceptions of the efficacy of threat-mitigating behaviors. Religion and science both offer threat mitigation, yet these two meaning-making systems are often considered incompatible. Do such epistemological conflicts sw the desire to employ erse precautions against threats? Or do in iduals – particularly in iduals who are highly reactive to threats – hedge their bets by using multiple threat-mitigating practices despite their potential epistemological incompatibility? Complicating this question, perceptions of conflict between religion and science likely vary across cultures likewise, pragmatic features of precautions prescribed by some religions make them incompatible with some scientifically-based precautions. The COVID-19 pandemic elicited erse precautionary behaviors, and thus provided an opportunity to investigate these questions. Across 27 societies from five continents (N = 7,844), in the majority of countries, in iduals’ practice of religious precautions such as prayer correlates positively with their use of scientifically-based precautions. Prior work indicates that greater adherence to tradition likely reflects greater reactivity to threats. Unsurprisingly given associations between many traditions and religion, we find that valuing tradition is predictive of employing religious precautions. However, consonant with its association with threat reactivity, we also find that traditionalism predicts adherence to public health precautions – a pattern that underscores threat-avoidant in iduals’ apparent tolerance for epistemological conflict in pursuit of safety.
Location: United States of America
No related grants have been discovered for Tatsuya Kameda.