Descriptive norms caused increases in mask wearing during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Human sociality is governed by two types of social norms: injunctive norms, which prescribe what people ought to do, and descriptive norms, which reflect what people actually do. The process by which these norms emerge and their causal influences on cooperative behavior over time are not well understood. Here, we study these questions through social norms influencing mask wearing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Leveraging 2 years of data from the United States (18 time points; n = 915), we tracked mask wearing and perceived injunctive and descriptive mask wearing norms as the pandemic unfolded. Longitudinal trends suggested that norms and behavior were tightly coupled, changing quickly in response to public health recommendations. In addition, longitudinal modeling revealed that descriptive norms caused future increases in mask wearing across multiple waves of data collection. These cross-lagged causal effects of descriptive norms were large, even after controlling for non-social beliefs and demographic variables. Injunctive norms, by contrast, had less frequent and generally weaker causal effects on future mask wearing. During uncertain times, cooperative behavior is more strongly driven by what others are actually doing, rather than what others think ought to be done.

Effectiveness and context dependency of social norm interventions: five field experiments on nudging pro-environmental and pro-social behavior

“…Social norm messaging had been successfully employed in encouraging pandemic health behavior such as hand sanitizer use ( Mobekk and Stokke, 2020 ) and increasing vaccination rates ( Zhang and Jin, 2023 ). For the specific behavior of mask wearing, a longitudinal study found that social norms were important determinants of mask wearing behavior (with descriptive norms being more influential than injunctive norms) ( Heiman et al, 2023 ).…”

The contribution of risk perception and social norms to reported preventive behaviour against selected vector-borne diseases in Guyana

“…The SARS-COV-2 pandemic has also drawn attention to the social norm component of preventive behaviour, where social norms can be either enforced through social interactions within groups of individuals sharing a common social space (social group (i)) and sustained by feelings of anxiety, guilt, embarrassment or shame if violated 27 , 28 , or defined by the most common and expected behaviour from the social group (ii). In the context of SARS-COV-2, it has been highlighted that social norms are constitutive of compliance with preventive measures 29 – 32 . We argue that social norms also apply to VBDs’ preventive behaviour.…”