Culture influences mask wearing, finds study

Countries and US states more predisposed to collectivist behaviour have more people following mask guidelines during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Around the world and within the US, the percentage of people wearing masks during the Covid-19 pandemic has varied enormously. What explains this? A new study co-authored by an MIT faculty member finds that a public sense of "collectivism" clearly predicts mask usage, adding a cultural and psychological perspective to the issue.

The study uses a series of datasets about mask usage and public attitudes, along with well-established empirical indices of collectivism, to evaluate the impact of those cultural differences on this element of the pandemic response. "Our data both within the United States and across the world shows that collectivism is a strong and important predictor of whether people in a region wear masks or not," says Jackson G. Lu, an assistant professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-author of a new paper detailing the results.

Collectivism broadly refers to the inclination to prioritize a group's needs over an individual's concerns, and social scientists have often worked to measure its presence among different populations. The researchers found a culture of collectivism to be a key driver of mask use even after accounting for many other factors, including political orientation, state policies, the severity of Covid-19 outbreaks, and more. "In collectivistic cultures, people consider wearing masks not only a responsibility or duty but also, a symbol of solidarity -- that we're standing together and fighting this pandemic together," Lu says.

The paper, "Collectivism Predicts Mask Use During COVID-19," appears today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The authors are Lu, who is the Mitsui Career Development Professor at MIT Sloan; Peter Jin, a research associate at MIT Sloan; and Alexander S. English, a researcher in the Department of Psychology and Behavioural Sciences at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China.