PhD defence A.B. (Annelot) Wismans

Summary:

The urgent need for behavioural research during the COVID-19 pandemic formed the start of this dissertation. Using six studies we analyse the role of individual differences in explaining preventive health behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic. As the pandemic had a large impact on entrepreneurship, we also focus on this topic in two studies. Altogether the studies cover three themes: Compliance with COVID-19 measures, COVID-19 vaccination, and Entrepreneurship during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This dissertation underlines that individual differences matter in explaining pandemic-related behaviours. Amongst others, we show that compliance with social distancing recommendations and compliance with hygiene recommendations are two distinct behaviours that are only weakly related. Complying with both these types of measures seems more difficult for (more) impulsive individuals. Face mask use is positively related to country-level policy stringency, though the strength of this link dependent on individual perception of government. We show that “confidence in the vaccine” and a “feeling of collective responsibility” are most important in explaining students’ COVID-19 vaccination intention. We observe both increases and decreases in students’ entrepreneurial intention during the pandemic, with women being more likely to report a decrease. Finally, we find that entrepreneurs are less likely to get vaccinated against COVID-19 compared to employees.

This dissertation adds to the understanding of behaviour during the pandemic. The pandemic has shown that insights from social and behavioural sciences are important when approaching pandemics, amongst others for the effectiveness of policy. Hopefully, this will increase their use during next pandemics, but also in approaching other large scale societal issues that involve collective behaviour change, like climate change.