Religion and reactance to COVID-19 mitigation guidelines.

During the current COVID-19 pandemic, religious gatherings have become intense hot spots for the spread of the virus. In this research, we focus on the religiosity of communities to examine whether religiosity helps or hinders adherence to mitigation policies such as shelter-in-place directives. Prior research has made opposing predictions as to the influence of religiosity. One stream predicts greater adherence because of rule-abiding norms and altruistic tendencies, whereas another has predicted lower adherence as a reaction against the restriction of personal and religious freedom. We used shelter-in-place directives as an intervention in a quasiexperiment to examine adherence over 30 days as a function of religiosity in the most populous metropolitan areas in the United States. When a shelter-in-place directive had not been imposed, religiosity did not affect people's movements. However, when the directive was imposed, higher religiosity resulted in less adherence to shelter-in-place directives. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).