COVID-19 Information and Behaviours: Evaluating cultural effects among UK, Japan, Taiwan

What is it about?

Understanding how people act on pandemic information remains limited, despite extensive research on COVID-19 risk perception. This study compared the UK, Japan, and Taiwan to uncover how individuals interpret COVID-19 information when deciding whether to adopt risk-averse behaviour. Using identical conjoint survey experiments, researchers found clear cultural contrasts: people in Japan and Taiwan based their caution on national infection counts, whereas those in the UK reacted mainly to infections in their immediate surroundings—home or workplace. A statistical clustering analysis with finite mixture models further revealed two distinctive behavioural groups across all regions. The risk-taking class, mostly young, vaccine-hesitant men with low trust in government health policy, showed a low frequency of protective behaviour. In contrast, the prudent class, characterized by higher science literacy, consistently engaged in risk-averse actions.

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Photo by Chris Barbalis on Unsplash

Photo by Chris Barbalis on Unsplash

Why is it important?

These findings highlight how cultural context, trust, and information processing shape behavioural responses to health crises. By uncovering cross-national and psychological differences, the study provides valuable insights for policymakers and health communicators aiming to design targeted, data-driven strategies that foster more effective public cooperation during future pandemics. The empirical research that extensively explores the relationship between information provision and risk-averse behaviors by taking into account of culture, trust, science literacy, health literacy, and vaccine hesitancy is scarce, but this study statistically evaluated such topic.

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