Altruism vs. egoism: Do personal values influence compliance with health behaviours?

In the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, individual compliance with preventive behaviours was the central public health tool available to control the spread of the disease. While the extant literature studied a range of psychological, social, economic, and political factors driving these behaviours, we argue that communication framing was such that personal values could be an important antecedent to explain compliance. Drawing on theoretical frameworks linking personal values to behaviour, we develop hypotheses that we test using survey data comprising 500 participants from four large cities in India. We measured key variables such as self-transcendent and self-enhancement values, perceived risk of infection, and sociodemographic factors using validated measures in the extant literature. We use ordinary least squares regression models to test our hypotheses. Consistent with our hypotheses, we find strong evidence that self-transcendent or altruistic values have a strong positive association with mask-wearing. In contrast, self-enhancement or egoistic values are associated positively with the frequency of hand hygiene. These relationships persist irrespective of the respondents' perception of Covid-19 risk for themselves or others. Additionally, we find that women and older individuals are more likely to wash their hands frequently. Although social desirability bias was present in some models, it did not affect the study's broad findings. Our study highlights the importance of personal values in shaping compliance with Covid-19 protective behaviours. Studies exploring the effectiveness of altruistic versus egoistic message framing in public health communications would benefit from controlling for personal value orientations.