Antinomianism and the Popular Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic

Merkley, E., Loewen, PJ Antinomianism and the public response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Nat Hum Behav 5, 706-715 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01112-w

Commentary

This study investigates whether antinomianism (a general distrust of experts and intellectuals) and shaped the public's response to Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19).

Using a representative survey of 27,615 Canadians conducted between March and July 2020, we examined consistent relationships between antinomianism and COVID-19 risk perception, social distance, mask use, misconceptions, and information acquisition.

The results, covering N = 4,910, strongly linked antinomianism to changes in mask usage within respondents, and used two conjoint analyses to provide experimental evidence of the importance of antinomianism in information-seeking behavior.

We found that preferences for COVID-19 news and COVID-19 information from N ~ 2500 experts indicate that higher levels of anti-intellectual sentiment dissipate from within respondents.

Anti-intellectualism poses a fundamental challenge in maintaining and improving public compliance with the professionally guided COVID-19 health directives, according to the study.

Antinomianism is a well known one, a term describing those who are distrustful of elites and other principles. Since these people seem to be expressing their distrust of the measures taken in this pandemic, it seems that this issue highlights the challenges for these people.