Background
impulsivity
It is challenging to study predictors and methods for improving pandemic public health guideline adherence because such behaviour is not readily observed in laboratory settings, nor easy to reveal with self-report cross-sectional surveys. Using ecological momentary assessment rather than one-shot surveys, the focus of this study is to find whether episodic future thinking and compassion exercises could contribute to increasing adherence to public health guidelines for preventing COVID-19 spread. We also investigate whether state impulsivity and vaccine attitudes predict guideline adherence, while assessing through which mechanism these predictors affect behaviour.Much research focuses on designing public health communication to achieve optimal public health guideline adherence [To increase future-orientedness, we use episodic future thinking (EFT): imagining or simulating experiences that might occur in one’s future. EFT decreases the degree to which rewards are devalued if they are received further in the future, known as delay discounting [Adopting protective behaviours is ultimately also prosocial, and prosocial behaviour can be enhanced by stimulating compassion, the feeling that arises in witnessing another’s suffering and that motivates a subsequent desire to help [In addition, vaccine hesitancy, attitudes on the effectiveness of these vaccines, and predictions about how soon the pandemic will end could factor into people’s behaviour. These attitudes are usually linked to other attitudes and behaviours relevant to pandemic behaviour such as lesser social distancing and mask-wearing [Impulsivity, the tendency to make rapid responses for short-term gratification and with insufficient regard for negative consequences [This study seeks to avoid the distortions that often afflict self-report measures about typical behaviour [In our preregistered analyses, we predicted that both the compassion intervention and the episodic future thinking intervention would increase the likelihood of controlling urges, where we analyse their effect on self-control and the intensity of urges. Furthermore, we predicted that state impulsivity is associated with stronger urges and fewer attempts to resist urges, and that vaccine hesitancy and shorter predicted back-to-normal time frames are negatively correlated with the likelihood of controlling an urge through diminishing self-control.