Purpose:The COVID-19 death-rate in Italy continues to climb, surpassing that in every other country. We implement one of the first nationally representative surveys about this unprecedented public health crisis and use it to evaluate the Italian government' public health efforts and citizen responses. Findings: (1) Public health messaging is being heard. Except for slightly lower compliance among young adults, all subgroups we studied understand how to keep themselves and others safe from the SARS-Cov-2 virus. Remarkably, even those who do not trust the government , or think the government has been untruthful about the crisis believe the messaging and claim to be acting in accordance. (2) The quarantine is beginning to have serious negative effects on the population's mental health. Policy Recommendations: Communications should move from explaining to citizens that they should stay at home to what they can do there. We need interventions that make staying following public health protocols more desirable, such as virtual social interactions, online social reading activities, classes, exercise routines, etc. -all designed to reduce the boredom of long term social isolation and to increase the attractiveness of following public health recommendations. Interventions like these will grow in importance as the crisis wears on around the world, and staying inside wears on people. 1 Roma Capitale (Municipality of Rome) convened our "COVID-19 International Behavioral Science Working Group" to (i) strengthen its public health policies and guidance, (ii) suggest new policies and guidance based on rigorous behavioral science, and (iii) develop empirical evidence about behavioral change. We report here empirical results and policy interventions aimed at achieving the objectives of the national Italian Government concerning the containment of the pandemic. Thanks to TIM S.p.A., Fastweb S.p.A., and Indra Italia S.p.A. for financial support. The current version of this paper is at GaryKing.org/covid-italy .

We thank our many volunteer translators, whose names are listed in the Appendix. We also thank Prolific for sponsoring the participants for the survey experiment and Aristeo Marras for data advice. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

We conducted a large-scale survey covering 58 countries and over 100,000 respondents at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic—between March 20 and April 7—to explore how beliefs about citizens’ and government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic affected mental well-being. Our analyses reveal three findings. First, many respondents indicate that their country’s citizens and government’s response was insufficient. Second, respondents’ perception of an insufficient public and government response and handling is associated with lower mental well-being. Third, we exploit time variation in country-level lockdown announcements, both around the world and through an event-study in the UK, and find that strong government actions—e.g., announcing a nationwide lockdown—were related to an improvement in respondents’ views of their fellow citizens and government, and to better mental well-being. These findings suggest that policy-makers may not only need to consider how their decisions affect the spread of COVID-19, but also how such choices influence the mental well-being of their population.

We conducted a large-scale survey covering 58 countries and over 100,000 respondents between late March and early April 2020 to study beliefs and attitudes towards citizens’ and governments’ responses at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Most respondents reported holding normative beliefs in support of COVID-19 containment measures, as well as high rates of adherence to these measures. They also believed that their government and their country’s citizens were not doing enough and underestimated the degree to which others in their country supported strong behavioral and policy responses to the pandemic. Normative beliefs were strongly associated with adherence, as well as beliefs about others’ and the government’s response. Lockdowns were associated with greater optimism about others’ and the government’s response, and improvements in measures of perceived mental well-being; these effects tended to be larger for those with stronger normative beliefs. Our findings highlight how social norms can arise quickly and effectively to support cooperation at a global scale.

The way in which people manage information disclosure contributes to one of the biggest challenges of the information age -online privacy. The current study sheds a light on the privacy paradox, a gap between attitudes and behaviour, by exploring the role of cognitive scarcity in privacy disclosure behaviour. Using a large sample of the UK online general population (N=969), we conducted a Randomised Controlled Trial experiment to test the effect of two forms of induced cognitive scarcity: ego depletion and working memory load, on information disclosure levels.Results indicate a significant effect of both forms of scarcity on information disclosure in the direction of increasing the latter, even in the context of a generalised high disclosure. Findings are discussed in light of the privacy paradox, future research, possible remedies and interventions.