Self-control and beliefs surrounding others’ cooperation predict own health-protective behaviors and support for COVID-19 government regulations: Evidence from two European countries

Abstract

In the current pandemic, both self-regulated health-protective behavior and government-imposed regulations are needed for successful outbreak mitigation. Going forward, researchers and decision-makers must therefore understand the factors contributing to individuals’ engagement in health-protective behavior, and their support for government regulations. Integrating knowledge from the literatures on self-control and cooperation, we explore an informed selection of potential predictors of individuals’ health-protective behaviors as well as their support for government regulations during the COVID-19 pandemic. Aiming for a conceptual replication in two European countries, we collected data in Switzerland (N = 352) and the UK before (N = 212) and during lockdown (n = 132) and conducted supervised machine learning for variable selection, followed by OLS regression, cross-sectionally and, in the UK sample, across time. Results showed that personal importance of outbreak mitigation and beliefs surrounding others’ cooperation are associated with both health-protective behavior and support for government regulations. Further, Swiss participants high in trait self-control engaged in health-protective behavior more often. Interestingly, perceived risk, age, and political orientation consistently displayed nonsignificant weak to zero associations with both health-protective behavior and support. Together, these Research Article This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, CC BY 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction, provided the original work is properly cited. findings highlight the contribution of self-control theories in explaining COVID-19-relevant outcomes, and underscore the importance of contextualizing self-control within the cooperative social context.