About COVID-19, freedoms and guilt
The pandemic changed our lives. But has it changed our decision-making, too?
There has been a lot of research about what drives our behaviour: from differences in our socio-economic status, age, gender, to emotions and more complicated nuances of our psyche, like psychological traits and perceptions. This of course, depends on what kind of behaviour we’re interested in, ranging from buying a particular brand to stopping a harmful habit. We never quite understood what the single most important factor in this equation is, or even how these factors interact. But, before we started responding to age-long questions, I wondered how futile this research even is in today’s time because power relations between behaviour drivers changed during COVID-19 time and this is how.
A study was conducted in July 2020 and 500 asthma participants had their say about what motivates them to adhere to asthma medication. Factors that affect adherence have been examined before and many (contradictory) findings were obtained: the main contributors to non-adherence to medication reportedly ranged from neuroticism to the level of deprivation. However, in the survey we conducted in the midst of a pandemic, a single feature seemed to be more important than anything else: a feeling of guilt.
‘I feel guilty when I don’t use my medication as much as I should’ was the strongest predictor of non-adherence. Even more interestingly, what it indicated was that people who normally use their medication quite regularly felt more guilty than people who adhered less. Guilt as a subject was examined before, but now more than ever it feels like it has taken a driver’s seat in many aspects of our lives.
So what kind of guilt could we have during the pandemic (whether we acknowledge it or not)?
More than anything else, we could feel guilty if we (knowingly) transmitted the virus to someone else; We could feel guilty if we didn’t wear a mask (or behaved in any inappropriate way) and then met the people we care about. We could feel guilty even about staying alive while others died or we could feel guilty even if we didn’t have major consequences as opposed to others that we know really suffered (the term coined as survivor guilt best explains this). We could feel guilty if we wrongly accuse someone of transmitting the virus, even if we politely acknowledge that ‘no one could have really known’. We could feel guilty for not reaching out to others more, or reaching out too much, while we’re all navigating our feelings of loneliness at different stages and levels. We could feel guilty if we don’t give enough attention to our kids, if we don’t try all ways to see an elderly member of our family, or if we don’t help our community as much as we know we can. In summary, there is a lot of guilt going on.
But what’s the process behind this guilt creation? A famous philosophy about freedom could provide a response.
According to Isaiah Berlin there are two types of freedom: freedom to do something and freedom from something, defined as negative and positive freedoms.
Now, more than ever, these freedoms are largely overlapping. In other words, the right of people to go out and breathe fresh air is directly opposite to the right of the government to do everything they can to stop spreading the virus. The right of the government to make a mistake has seriously affected the right of the population to preserve national health. The freedom of anti-vaxers to not get vaccinated is overlapping with the freedom of other people to not get ill. The issue is this: where these freedoms start and end, is completely left to our own interpretation.
These feelings might be leading our decision-making more than ever and this is something that needs to be taken into account, whether we’re a company trying to save customer loyalty, or the government making a campaign to protect the public. The lack of a generally accepted moral compass leads us to daily navigation of our own freedoms, whilst avoiding stepping all over the freedoms of others. If we do knowingly overstep: we end up with the familiar feeling we had discussed at the start: guilt. There is a lot of pressure as a result of this, even when it comes to the most basic daily decision-making. Just ask asthma patients.
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Photo by Callum Skelton on Unsplash
