Friday, February 5, 2021

 503 Covid-19 and morality

 In their study of Japan, Qian and Yahara (2020) looked at effects of morality on the experience of Covid-!9, with the following indicators: avoiding harm to others, providing care and protection, fairness, in-group loyalty, respect for authority and purity. Avoiding harm to others was found to have a negative effect in reinforcing stress, anxiety, underestimation of the pandemic and a positive effect on preventive behaviour, material sufficiency, likelihood of infection, concerns regarding family and children, and influence on life. Fairness had a positive effect on depression and a negative effect on material sufficiency, and information sufficiency. In-group loyalty was positive on epidemic consciousness, and negative on concern for family. Respect for authority was negative on preventive behaviour and positive on medical sufficiency.

 On the basis of a sample of 1032 people, Everett et al. (2020) investigated which types of morality in messages about Covid, had more positive effect on protective actions. Those actions were: washing hands, avoiding gatherings, self-isolation, sharing health messages, positive beliefs about others’ intentions, beliefs about personal control and responsibility, cancelling travel plans. They hypothesised and confirmed that messages based on deontology and virtues would have a larger effect than utilitarian messages, counter to what most participants believed. They surmised however that ‘this may be weakened or even reversed if the message comes from a person in authority, who is supposed to act more impartially and make cost/benefit decisions for the greater good’. In other words, they expect people to have a technocratic view of officials. They studied messages from a leader or a citizen, providing either no moral justification or a moral justification (deontological or virtue-based). They measured the effect of morality over non-moral messages, taking into account moral stand. The effect of deontology was larger than that of virtues. They measured moral stand along two dimenions: it is OK to cause instrumental harm (IH) in service of the greater good, vs. impartial concern for the wellbeing of all: ’Impartial Beneficence’ (IB). Across most actions there was a positive effect of IB, not of IH. They found that mistrust in utilitarian (relative to deontological) agents is lower for people with utilitarian views themselves.They admitted that the effects found for the effects of deontology and ethics were ‘modest’, and for virtue-based messages no significant effect.except intentions to share messages and beliefs on the stand of others. The effects of demographics were larger. Older and more religious people had stronger positive intentions, and black people more than whites.They could reject the hypothesis that utilitarian messages would be more effective. Anvari (2020) objected that the effects of morality were not significant. Everett et al. concluded that messages focused on duties and responsibilities toward family, friends and fellow citizens is to be recommended.

 On the basis of 15.000 respondents across 10 South-American nations with dissimilar Covid effects, Navajas et al. (2020), studied the effect of moral preferences on moral decisions. concerning Covid-related actions, and how.this effect was influenced by contextual factors and the five personality types.The moral preferences were oriented at two utilitarian principles:

1.Permissiveness of instrumental harm: harming some people for the good of the whole.

2 Impartial benificence, with more empathetic concern.

 Instrumental harm concerns the question how many people you would sacrifice for the benefit of the whole. There were four indicators for instrumental harm: causing harm, acceptance of temporary political oppression, torture, acceptance of collateral damage and prioritising in the allocation of scarce resources, in this case ventilators. There were three indicators for impartial.benificence: sacrifice a leg tot save someone, give a kidney, orientation to wellbeing of all human beings, no favours, finding it wrong to keep money one does not really need rather than donating it.

 They conducted an analysis of effects of these dimensions of utilitarian morality and other variables on responses to five morally loaded questions: Three questions were on the tension between public health and other values of wellbeing, such as: surrendering sensitive personal data to trace the path of the virus, imposing physical distance by forbidding public gatherings and business operations, and notifying a covid protocol breach of a friend vs. protecting him/her from facing prison. Number four was whether all patients should be treated equally or if younger people should be prioritised, and assignment of ventilators in case of limited supply, whether all patients should be treated.equally or whether young people should be prioritised, and whether animal rights could be suspended to some extent to further the development of a vaccine.

 The responses were condensed by projecting them on two ‘principal components’ (PC’s).These were labeled as follows: 

1.      Concern about human life, correlating with permissiveness concerning instrumental harm

2.      Focus on public health, correlating with impersonal beneficence

The table below indicates which responses loaded positively (+) or highly so (++), and which loaded negatively (-) or highly so (--) on the PC’s

                                                           PC1                 PC2

saving younger patients                     ++                   --

vaccine development                         ++                   --

animal rights                                      --                     ++

data protection                                   --                     -

virus tracing                                       ++                   +

informing protocol breach                 +                     ++

protecting a friend                             -                      --

wanting economic activity                 -                      --

physical distance                                +                     ++

all patients equal                                --                     ++

Effects on these PC’s were studied of: the two moral stands, contextual factors , the five personality traits and demographic variables, with a total of 15 explanatory variables. The contextual factors were: per capita number of deaths, per capita number of confirmed Covid cases and.personal proximity to Covid. The demograhic variables were gender and age.

The two utilitarian stands agreed on prioritising public health over non-health concerns. Impartial beneficence had a negative effect on prioritising ventilator use and on lowering thresholds on animal rights, and instrumental harm had the opposite effect.

Per capita number of deaths, and per capita number of confirmed Covid cases had a positive effect on both principal components of responses.The effect of personal proximity had no effect on the PC’s, indicating that societal impact was considered more important,

In contrast with the rationality of institutional rules, morality is accompanied with emotions When policies and messages go against one’s morals, this can produce negative emotional reactions and polarisation, as we now observe across different countries. Their thesis was that conflicts between public health messages and moral values evoke emotions. Trevors and Duffy (2020) tested their thesis that conflicts between public health messages and moral values evoke emotions. They investigated the self-reported emotional responses of 518 people in the US to public messages with purported refutations of common Covid-19 misconceptions (e.g. that the flu is.just as bad if not worse than Covid). from 12 states The sample was not representative for the whole country, but ‘purposeful’, from communities known to be strongly opposed to social distancing identified in previous research as among the highest to favour immediate return to normal economic activity.

Respondents completed five prior knowledge items, a modified version of the ‘Moral foundations Questionnaire (MFQ)’ and read 5 short messages that refuted misconceptions, and then reported their emotional response, whether the content of the message conflicted with their personal views and/or views of their community, and the extent to which they believed the refutation and skimmed it quickly.

Factor analyses were conducted, , separately on the MFQ and the emotion response items.Three factors were found from the MFQ that elained 39% of variance:

Binding ,with eight items, indicating an ethic of group cohesion and social order

Individualising, with six items, indicating a preference for individuals. In aliberal ideology.

Libertarian, with four items, indicating a preference for autonomous exercise of liberties.

On emotion response, three factors explained 55% of variance:

Anxious, with variables anxious, scared, hopeless, and threatened

Hopeful, with variables hopeful, relieved, hapy, curious, surprised

Doubtful, with variables doubtful, bored, angry, confused.

Concerning the results, there were complicated interactions between the variables, for which I refer to the publication. Salient results were the following: Overall refutations did increase factual knowledge, and this accounted for 60% of post test score variance. Conflict of the messages with beliefs, hopefulness, doubtfulness and skimming had a negative effect on learing, and belief and prior knowledge had a posiive effect. Binding and libertarianism had a negative effect on learning when the corrections conflicted with views, and individualising had a positive effect.

Overall, the study showed that indeed the effectiveness of refutations depends on moral values. Strong moral concerns for individual well-being are more likely to let people undate their Covid beliefs, while ‘morally valued group cohesion or individual freedoms are more likely tot o affectively or cognitiovely reject corrctive informtion’, and ‘Public health actions undermined valued social ties or personal autonomy’.

The conclusion of the authors is that ‘Corrections should be adapted to connect with the morality of recipients, … link to concerns for fairness and suffering for the individualising stand, obeying authority, defending purity, and patriotism for the binding stance, and self-protection for the libertarian stand.

Everett. J,A, C. Colombatto, V. Chituc, W.J. Brady and M.J.Crockett 2020, ‘The effectiveness of moral messages on public health behavioural intentions during the Covid-19 pandemic’, preprint, Dept. of Psychology, UK: University of Kent

  Navajas, J., F.A.Heduan, G. Garbulski, E. Tagliazucchi, D. Ariely and M.Sigman 2020,’Utilitarian reasoning about moral problems of the Covid-19 crisis’, OST preprint, https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/ktv62 .

 Qian, K. and T. Yahara. 2020, ‘Mentality and behaviour in Civid-19, emerging status in

Japan: influence of personality, morality and ideology’, Plos One.17/t e0235883

Trevors, G and M.C. Duffy 2020, ‘Correcting Covid-19 misconceptions requires caution’, https://doi.org/10.3102/003189X20953825

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