Culture of Honor and COVID-19: Regional Mitigation Efforts in the United States During the Pandemic

Abstract

As the COVID-19 pandemic struck in early 2020, states in the United States (U.S.) varied widely in the arrival of the first case of the virus, the official response of government officials and citizens, and the overall impact of the virus. The Culture of Honor, a reputation-based system more prevalent in the U.S. South and West, is linked with lawlessness or mistrust of the law where it exists, fierce independence, and condones aggressive behaviors, particularly in response to threat. The current project explored the influence of the Culture of Honor on perceptions of the legitimacy of COVID-19 messaging, government actions and citizens responses, and overall impact of the pandemic at the state level. It was predicted that the overall numbers of citizens infected by COVID-19 would be higher in culture of honor states, that any actions taken by government officials would be strict and perceived negatively by citizens residing in culture of honor states, and that citizens would be unlikely to follow any imposed government restrictions. Publicly available data were compiled for each of the U.S. states including total number of COVID-19 cases, total deaths, how the elected officials managed any coordinated response (such as issuing executive orders, any stay-at-home or lockdown orders), and coded evidence of citizens violating any of these orders such as by protesting or showing up at public locations that were currently closed. I am deeply indebted to Luke Conway for providing access to an individual-level dataset collected via Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) that included 978 people from across the U.S. who had responded to items related to these variables of interest. Analyses indicated that individuals in US states identified as Culture of Honor had seen greater impact to their states of the COVID-19 pandemic as of 2020 in several ways, including higher total number of citizens who tested positive and also died from COVID-19, less support for government action to mitigate the spread, and stronger distrust of information shared by their state authorities about the pandemic. These findings indicate that cultural values including the Culture of Honor could impede state-level attempts to thwart the spread of contagious diseases and other measures intended to protect individuals.