A Moderated Mediation Model of Self-Construal, Social Trust, and Compliance on Covid-19 Public Health Regulation: A Cross-country Analysis

To address the global Covid-19 pandemic, governments around the world require on the collective cooperation of their citizens to comply with public health regulation. Earlier studies examined the extent to which self-construal has an impact on individual compliance to law. However, existing literature has paid little significant attention to behavioural outcome of self-construal in the pandemic context across countries and cultures. The aim of this study was; 1) to determine whether interdependent self-construal predicts compliance of Covid-19 public health regulation, 2) to examine if the association was mediated by individual social trust, and 3) to test whether these associations were moderated by respondent's country of residence (US x Indonesia). General adult respondents from US (N=231) and Indonesia (N=440) were voluntary participated in a survey measuring their trust to the government, interdependent self-construal orientation and compliance toward Covid-19 public health regulation. While our moderated mediation model involving respondent’s country residence did not support the hypothesis, the mediation analysis demonstrated significant association between interdependent self-construal and compliance via social trust. Our additional simple moderation analysis on direct effect of interdependent self-construal and compliance showed significant findings. Further, theoretical and practical implications of these findings were discussed in the following paper.