Why we should care about moral foundations when preparing for the next pandemic: Insights from Canada, the UK and the US

Health behaviors that do not effectively prevent disease can negatively impact psychological wellbeing and potentially drain motivations to engage in more effective behavior, potentially creating higher health risk. Despite this, studies linking “moral foundations” (i.e., concerns about harm, fairness, purity, authority, ingroup, and/or liberty) to health behaviors have generally been limited to a narrow range of behaviors, specifically effective ones. We therefore explored the degree to which moral foundations predicted a wider range of not only effective but ineffective (overreactive) preventative behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic. In Study 1, participants from Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States reported their engagement in these preventative behaviors and completed a COVID-specific adaptation of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire during the pandemic peak. While differences occurred across countries, authority considerations consistently predicted increased engagement in both effective preventative behaviors but also ineffective overreactions, even when controlling for political ideology. By contrast, purity and liberty considerations reduced intentions to engage in effective behaviors like vaccination but had no effect on ineffective behaviors. Study 2 revealed that the influence of moral foundations on U.S participants’ behavior remained stable 5-months later, after the pandemic peak. These findings demonstrate that the impact of moral foundations on preventative behaviors is similar across a range of western democracies, and that recommendations by authorities can have unexpected consequences in terms of promoting ineffective—and potentially damaging—overreactive behaviors. The findings underscore the importance of moral concerns for the design of health interventions that selectively promote effective preventative behavior.