Dr Darragh McCashin, DCU School of Psychology, was part of a global study which looked at the psychology of Covid-19 policy adherence.

Covid-19 fear message not enough to convince many to follow pandemic restrictions, says Nature study involving DCU psychologist

12/05/2023

The blanket message of ‘fear’ was not sufficient to ensure that many people adhered to Covid-19 restrictions and a more nuanced approach is needed for future pandemics.

That’s the message from a paper on a global study into the psychology of adherence to Covid-19 restrictions which has just been published in Nature, and had Irish input from Dr Darragh McCashin, Assistant Professor at the School of Psychology.

“It was great to be involved with such a high-quality paper, with such huge collaborations across so many countries,” said Dr McCashin.

“The Irish part of the study was done by me and two researchers at UL; we recruited online, and we got between 800 and 1000 participants over a four-month period.”

The study found that the political landscape of a country was a major factor in a person’s adherence to restrictions, as was their morality and personality traits.

The research showed that making appeals to ‘follow the science’ is not effective when trying to reach people who are inclined to be anti-authoritarian for one reason or another.

It is also questionable whether making an appeal, based on fear of the virus is more effective than trying to rally the nation together, to, in Ireland’s case, chase Covid off the island.

Future

The lesson for trying to get people to adhere to public health messages, is that making blanket appeals, based on fear, are not as effective as targeting sub-groups in society.

“For a future pandemic it may be more effective to personalise messages based on key variables such as a person’s age, and their moral development,” said Dr Cashin.

“We also know from this research that anyone who is not inclined to adhere to restrictions for one reason or another needs to have different, more nuanced messaging.”

“This study also showed us that the big five personality traits play a huge role in determining adherence; conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness, extraversion, and agreeableness.”

“Messages based on fear might appeal to the more neurotic personality types, while calmer, evidenced-based messages might appeal better to conscientious types.”

Link to paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-023-02080-8