UCLA

Individuals vary in the extent to which they embrace their society’s traditions, as well as in the perception of threats as salient and necessitating mitigation. Traditionalism and threat sensitivity may be linked if—over evolutionary time—traditions offered avenues for reliably addressing threats, either through instrumental and/or ritual and cooperative benefits. Alternatively, if traditionalists are particularly attuned to threats to their group, they may undertake stronger mitigating responses to those threats. These possibilities – which are not mutually exclusive – suggest that greater traditionalism may predict stronger mitigating responses toward particular threats. However, threat-avoidance motivations can conflict with competing priorities and epistemic commitments in the real world. The COVID-19 pandemic represented a moment in time in which people across the world undertook costly threat-mitigating behaviors, providing an important test of the traditionalism-threat avoidance relationship under complex real-world conditions.

Chapter 1 investigates the relationship between COVID-19 precautions, traditionalism, political orientation, and perceptions of competing tradeoffs with public health measures in the U.S. early in the COVID-19 pandemic. Results show that while more socially conservative and traditional Democrats reported taking more COVID-19 precautions than more liberal Democrats, that same relationship did not hold true among Republicans. Instead, Republicans placed greater emphasis on priorities that competed with COVID-19 precautions, which suppressed an underlying positive correlation between traditionalism and threat-mitigation among Republicans.

Chapter 2 investigates similar phenomena, but in a cross-cultural context given that perceptions of tradeoffs with COVID-19 precautions are likely to vary across social contexts. Data were collected on COVID-19 precautions, traditionalism, and associated tradeoffs across 27 different countries. Results indicated that, across these study sites, traditionalism tended to positively correlate with behaviors intended to mitigate the threat of COVID-19. Nevertheless, at some study sites, this relationship was suppressed by competing priorities, such as lower trust in scientists and greater concerns about personal liberties, similar to the results found in Study 1.

Traditionalism is often concomitant with meaning systems such as religion. Using the same dataset from 27 countries, Chapter 3 further explores the relationship between religion and public health precautions. One predicted tested is whether religious precautions and public health precautions clashed during the COVID-19 pandemic, given the possibility for epistemic conflict between religion and science. An alternative prediction is that individuals hedge their bets by pursuing threat-mitigating behaviors across diverse epistemic domains. Results supported the latter possibility, showing that individuals’ enactment of religious precautions positively correlated with their enactment of public health precautions, although again this relationship was sensitive to specific tradeoffs.

Chapter 4 reflects on possibilities for greater consilience between evolutionary and psychological anthropologies. Given the disciplinary siloing that occurs in academia, it is particularly important to consider how different fields can generatively produce better knowledge production through interaction. I point toward several areas of research as being particularly productive in this interchange, particularly in the domains of cultural transmission and emotion. This interdisciplinary spirit is reflected in the empirical work presented in Chapters 1-3.