HOW NATIONAL IDENTITY AFFECTS INFECTION OUTCOME Could a country’s collective psychology determine the outcomes of a pandemic? A global cohort of researchers believes so. LEM CHETTY
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LAUREN MULLIGAN
t is surreal to think how a microscopic virus has disrupted life as we know it, globally, and forever. During early lockdowns worldwide, we watched a science-fiction movie we never thought could materialise come to life, from Wuhan to Rome, Sydney to Johannesburg. No one was untouched. It was mindboggling and even virologists were astounded at times. By October 2020, more than 20 million people globally had been infected with the new coronavirus and over one million have died.1 The Covid-19 pandemic represents one of the greatest health crises of the past 100 years. A pertinent question to ask is what helped us as a global society to minimise the pandemic’s effects and reduce the rate of death? Face masks and young populations, some might argue. But a global team of nearly 230 experts found another unlikely answer in a group paper, International Collaboration on the social & moral psychology of COVID-19. The answer is national identity.
POSITIVE NATIONAL IDENTITY MATTERS
The research brought together scholars from around the world to examine “psychological factors underlying the attitudes and behavioural intentions related to Covid-19,” explains Dr Sahba Besharati, Senior Lecturer in cognitive neuroscience at Wits. The international team, led by Professor Jay van Bavel from New York University, focused on a wide range of factors such as beliefs in conspiracy theories, cooperation, risk perception, social belonging, intellectual humility, national identification, collective
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narcissism, moral identity, political ideology, self-esteem and cognitive reflection. The lofty goal was to generate a massive multi-national sample that could serve as a public database for the scientific community. “It is a huge dataset which will be used for years to come. The sample currently includes 44 000 citizens in 67 countries,” Besharati says. The international team investigated why people adopted public health behaviours (such as wearing masks and screening) and endorsed public policy interventions (like closing bars and restaurants) during the early stages of the pandemic, among other research questions. “The results showed that those who identified more strongly with their nation showed greater support for public health policies and adopted these public health behaviours,” says Besharati. The paper defines “national identification” as the personal significance that being part of a nation holds for an individual. This national identity has been found to play an important role in motivating people to make costly contributions that benefit other members of their country – taxes, for example. The researchers found that harnessing this national identity could help promote “collective efforts to combat the pandemic within one’s country”. Van Bavel found that Covid-19 revealed that during a pandemic there may be “healthy” elements of national identity (which can also have negative connotations such as xenophobia). “Citizens who identified more strongly with their nation reported greater