Depressed mood, a better predictor of social-distancing compliance and candidate for intervention compared to working memory capacity

https://www.pnas.org/content/118/8/e2024017118

Xie et al. (1) report that a higher working memory (WM) capacity increases social-distancing compliance, even after accounting for relevant covariates (e.g., mood and personality traits), and that this effect is partly mediated by a facilitating benefit-over-cost analysis about social-distancing practice. In light of these findings, the authors suggest that interventions aiming to increase WM capacity might help to enhance compliance to social-distancing practice in times of crisis. After reanalyzing the data, we suggest that their conclusions should be nuanced with respect to 1) the disproportionate focus on WM capacity relative to other factors that equally explain the outcome and 2) the partial statistical control over factors’ indirect effects on social distancing.

First, we ran a dominance analysis (2) to compare the relative importance of the different predictors entered in the model of the authors’ second study. Among the 22.3% of variance explained by their model, depressed mood (3.2%), WM capacity (3.1%), and agreeableness (3.0%) shared approximately the same proportion of explained variance. Therefore, in order to address the lack of compliance to social distancing, alleviating the negative effect of depressed mood on social distancing (3) or enhancing agreeableness through interventions (4) could be considered as reasonable options.

Indeed, the unique role of depressed mood, in both the regression and the mediation analyses, is at least as important as WM capacity. Unlike working memory training that shows no convincing evidence for far transfer effects (7), we argue that interventions aiming to dampen depressed mood (rather than to enhance WM capacity) offer a more promising venue to increase social-distancing compliance.