Compliance Without Fear: Individual-Level Predictors of Protective Behavior During the First Wave of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic requires rapid public compliance with advice from health authorities. Here, we ask who was most likely to do so during the first wave of the pandemic. We conducted cross-sectional and panel surveys in eight Western democracies between March 19 and May 16 asking 26,508 citizens about their protective behavior relating to COVID-19. Consistent with prior research on epidemics, we find that perceptions of threat and risk factors are crucial and culturally uniform determinants of protective behavior. On this basis, authorities could potentially foster further compliance by appealing to fear of COVID-19, but there may be normative and practical limits to such a strategy. Instead, we find that another major source of compliance are feelings of efficacy. Using individual-level panel data, we find evidence that feelings of efficacy are amendable to change and exert a causal effect on protective behavior. Importantly, the effects of such feelings are especially strong among those who do not feel threatened, creating a path to compliance without fear. In contrast, two other major candidates for facilitating compliance from the social sciences, interpersonal trust and institutional evaluations, have surprisingly little motivational power. To combat future waves of the pandemic, health authorities should thus focus on facilitating efficacy in the public.

What predicts adherence to COVID-19 government guidelines? Longitudinal analyses of 51,000 UK adults

“…Our finding that trust in government predicted compliance echoes findings from previous studies 7, [10][11][12][13][14] . While the estimated effects are small, changes in compliance did not dissipate immediately.…”

Changes in risk perception and self-reported protective behaviour during the first week of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States

“…We also explored effects of age, sex and location on risk perception and engagement in protective behaviours. To examine the effects of age, we split subjects into three groups based on age (18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(26)(27)(28)(29)(30)(31)(32)(33)(34)(35), 35-80) using a tertile split. For analyses involving location, we assigned each individual to a census-defined region according to their state (https://www.census.gov/geographies/referencemaps/2010/geo/2010-census-regions-and-divisions-of-the-united-states.html), resulting in each subject being allocated to one of the following regions: South, West, Midwest or North East.…”

Compulsory Face Mask Policies Do not Affect Community Mobility in Germany

“…Second, we contribute to the small but rapidly growing literature using aggregate GPS data to study the effect of policies trying to contain the spread of COVID-19 on mobility patterns [Allcott et al, 2020, Dasgupta et al, 2020. Using GPS data is one of the main alternatives to using surveys [Briscese et al, 2020, Jørgensen et al, 2020, which likely do not provide reliable data on mobility due to social desirability bias [Daoust et al, 2020].…”