Social and moral psychology of COVID-19 across 69 countries

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all domains of human life, including the economic and social fabric of societies. One of the central strategies for managing public health throughout the pandemic has been through persuasive messaging and collective behaviour change. To help scholars better understand the social and moral psychology behind public health behaviour, we present a dataset comprising of 51,404 individuals from 69 countries. This dataset was collected for the International Collaboration on Social & Moral Psychology of COVID-19 project (ICSMP COVID-19). This social science survey invited participants around the world to complete a series of moral and psychological measures and public health attitudes about COVID-19 during an early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic (between April and June 2020). The survey included seven broad categories of questions: COVID-19 beliefs and compliance behaviours; identity and social attitudes; ideology; health and well-being; moral beliefs and motivation; personality traits; and demographic variables. We report both raw and cleaned data, along with all survey materials, data visualisations, and psychometric evaluations of key variables.

Fig. 1

A world map visualizing the number of participants in each surveyed country. Note: This heat map shows the number of respondents from each country. The gray areas are the countries that are not covered by the data, and the colour scale shows the size of the sample in accordance with the scale on the lower left side.

Fig. 2

International Collaboration on the Social and Moral Psychology of COVID-19: Investigated constructs, items and variables.

Fig. 3

Gantt Chart illustrating the data collection periods for each surveyed country.

Fig. 4

International Collaboration on the Social and Moral Psychology of COVID-19: Investigated constructs, items and variables.

Fig. 5

International Collaboration on the Social and Moral Psychology of COVID-19: Investigated constructs, items and variables.

Fig. 6

Data quality indicators for each surveyed country. Note: The percentage of missing data considered all the questions in the survey (i.e., all sociodemographics and psychological scales”). We calculated, for each country, the mean of the participants’ proportion of missing data across all survey questions, including sociodemographics (this information is also provided in our reproducible report of Fig. 6, where the R code is provided).

Fig. 7

Cross-cultural differences in Social & Moral Psychology of COVID-19 across 69 countries. Note: Each world heat map in the figure shows the means score, at the country level, for constructs in the survey. Conspiracy Beliefs - participant’s beliefs in conspiracy theories regarding COVID-19; Morality as Cooperation - participant’s moral concern based on the morality-as-cooperation theory; Spatial Distancing - participant’s support for spatial distancing as a strategy against COVID-19; Collective Narcissism - participant’s narcissism, i.e., an inflated view regarding their ingroup (in this research we focused on nationality); National Identity - participant’s identity attached to belonging to a nation; Policy Support - participant’s support to public policies (e.g., closing parks or schools) as a strategy against COVID-19.

Fig. 8

Cross-cultural differences in associations of Social & Moral Psychology of COVID-19 across sex and ideology in 69 countries.

Fig. 9

Cross-cultural differences in associations of Social & Moral Psychology of COVID-19 across age in 69 countries.

Fig. 10

Support for policies in 69 countries.

Fig. 11

Collective narcissism in 69 countries.

Fig. 12

Spatial distancing in 69 countries.

Fig. 13

Morality as cooperation in 69 countries.

Fig. 14

National identity in 69 countries.

Fig. 15

Cross-cultural differences in Internal Consistency Coefficients (Cronbach’s alpha, McDonald’s Omega, Guttman Split-Half), and variance explained of Social & Moral Psychology Constructs in 69 countries. Note: internal consistency typically refers to correlations between different items on the same test to evaluate the extent to which latent indicators comprising the scale measure the same construct.