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Ambivalence and Adherence to Recommendations to Reduce the Spread of COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic poses one of the largest behavioral change challenges in the last decades. Because currently, there is no widely available pharmaceutical treatment available to contain the spread of infection, governments worldwide rely – at least to some extent – on behavioral recommendations aimed at reducing spread. The success of this strategy is dependent on the number of people that follow the recommendations. Most recommendations need people to change their behavior or adopt a new behavior. We propose that such behavioral change, with direct costs and delayed benefits, is a source of conflict and mixed feelings. This ambivalence negatively affects adherence to such recommendations. We present three studies that support our hypotheses: the more ambivalent people are about the recommendations, the less they follow them. We also examined the effect of the mixed emotions of hope and worry on adherence and find that it positively relates to adherence. Our findings replicated both in a U.S. sample as well as a representative German sample. Our work is the first to investigate the role of ambivalence in large-scale behavior change and highlight the importance of understanding the conflict that comes with changing behavior. We discuss implications for policy and communication.