My Story
"In March 2020, I initiated a project on 'Fostering prosocial responses to the COVID-19 pandemic’, combining social psychology and political science. Many topics are polarized along party lines: the ‘party over policy effect’ illustrates that people’s preferences for political parties will make them support policies proposed by that party more compared to the same policy proposed by the opposition. This can be detrimental to public compliance with, for example, recommendations to manage the COVID-19 pandemic."
"For example, in the US at least, people will be more likely to endorse a climate change policy if it is proposed by their own party, although the policy benefits the entire society."
"Here, we are interested in whether the public response to the COVID-19 pandemic is a partisan issue: Will people comply more with recommendations when these come from politicians they already endorse vs. the opposition? Is this effect due to trust in one’s own group and distrust in the out-group? and How can a sense of shared identity with the most vulnerable to COVID-19 strengthen compliance?"
"This project is a tremendous group effort, with colleagues from the Universities of Colorado Boulder (Leaf Van Boven, Jennifer Cole, Alex Flores), Universities Libre de Bruxelles (Olivier Klein), California Santa Barbara (David Sherman), and Swansea (Dion Curry in COAH and Fred Boy in SoM). I received £3,672 from Swansea University’s Greatest Need Fund, that we used in April 2020 for participant payment for one experiment conducted in the US (N = 2000, Cloud Research’s Prime Panels) and two studies in the UK (N = ~1000 each, Prolific Academic). The protocol, materials and data analysis plan were pre-registered prior to data collection and the first article will be submitted for peer-review shortly."
"This study has led to my now being a part of an international team on a secondary cross-sectional project funded by NSF in the US ($200k, Prof Van Boven is the lead). We investigate how partisanship and introspection shape public response to the COVID-19 pandemic with a longitudinal study (US) and cross-sectional studies (UK, Italy, Sweden, Israel, Singapore, South Korea, and Brazil), coupled with media monitoring in all countries. We have collected the data from wave one of the survey in August 2020 and are currently analysing it. I am also in the process of writing a fellowship application on trust, that will continue this work in the next year."
"This funding was essential for enabling us to collect data in such a short time. Typically, it takes much time, effort, and money to recruit large enough samples of participants. The urgency and ephemerality of this pandemic have put extra pressures on our work, and we could not have collected such good quality data without the help from the Greatest Need Fund. Simply put, it allowed us to do so much in so little time. In an ideal world, any researcher would need this kind of help to advance knowledge. We are grateful that this time we had this help."
