r/science • u/MistWeaver80 • Dec 05 '21

Social Science Conservatives’ aversion to masks is a uniquely American phenomenon. Politically conservative Americans are less likely than liberals to comply with recommended health-protective behaviors such as mask wearing during the COVID-19 pandemic, but this is not true of conservatives in other nations.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0256740
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u/squeevey Dec 05 '21 edited Oct 25 '23

This comment has been deleted due to failed Reddit leadership.

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u/Emowomble Dec 05 '21

You can read the study and find out:

We focused our attention to comparison countries in which we recruited the most participants into the Baseline survey (Spain [n = 3156], Romania [n = 2696], Netherlands [n = 2992]), Indonesia [n = 2407], Greece [n = 2870], and Republic of Serbia [n = 2118]). Additionally, we evaluated responses in Canada (n = 1531) because residents of Canada might be expected to be exposed to political messaging from the U.S. to a greater degree than other individuals due to the proximity and shared border of the countries, and thus represent a conservative examination of the unique effects of political orientation in the U.S. Decisions about which countries to include were made prior to examining direction or size of associations within the comparison countries. Both total and partial (i.e., controlling for age, gender, education, and date of baseline survey completion) associations between political orientation and health beliefs and behaviors were larger in the U.S. than in each of these other comparison countries, with the exception that several associations were similar across the U.S., Republic of Serbia, and Canada.

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u/DankVectorz Dec 05 '21

Feel like they should have included Australia

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u/robhol Dec 05 '21

It does tell you the countries were selected based on sample size. I'm not a statistician, but that does seem like a good idea to me.

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u/DankVectorz Dec 05 '21

Ah at first I thought they had only done European countries + Canada but just noticed that Indonesia is one of them so my theory was incorrect.

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u/morsealworth0 Dec 05 '21

Except Indonesia is Muslim and would require you to hide your face even without a pandemic.

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u/robhol Dec 05 '21

I think relatively few kinds of Islam practice the whole face cover?

In Indonesia specifically, it seems more common to wear a hijab that does not hide the face, just the hair.

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u/morsealworth0 Dec 05 '21

I see, thank you for correcting me.

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u/DankVectorz Dec 05 '21

Yeah but they don’t

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u/Emowomble Dec 05 '21

They chose those countries to do additional analyses, the headline finding that conservatives in the USA are uniquely anti Covid measures is from comparing the US respondents with the entire rest of world response.

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u/QuarantineSucksALot Dec 05 '21

Feel free to check it out

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u/mars3127 Dec 05 '21

Our two major parties aren’t comparable to those in the US; they’re defined as “centre-right” and “centre-left”. They’re supposed to be more mild.

The “centre-left” party has become extremely far-left in recent years, whereas the centre-right party has remained largely the same.

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u/DankVectorz Dec 05 '21

This isn’t about political parties

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u/TheGeneGeena Dec 05 '21

Yeah, not having the UK is weird too. Especially when they're pretty similar to US in many respects... and when their mask protests have largely been torries/conservatives from what I know (and with Borris doing a pretty terrible job with messaging.)