Three Pillars of Physical Distancing: Anxiety, Prosociality, and Rule Compliance During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The outbreak of a global pandemic such as COVID-19 poses a challenge for societies across the world. Lacking both vaccination and medical treatment, the only way to combat the spread of a virus in its early stages are behavioral measures, particularly physical distancing behavior. The present work proposes three pillars of individuals’ engagement in physical distancing: anxiety, prosociality, and rule compliance. In a large (N = 1,504), pre-registered study among German adults, we studied both situation-specific tendencies and stable personality traits that are theoretically associated with these pillars in relation to self-reported physical distancing behavior and underlying motives. Results supported the importance of each of the proposed pillars for physical distancing behavior. That is, for each pillar, we found (some) relations of the corresponding tendencies and personality traits with physical distancing (motives) as expected. Overall, the project provides a comprehensive picture of physical distancing behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Following the crowd in times of crisis: Descriptive norms predict physical distancing, stockpiling, and prosocial behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Regarding personality, particularly honestyhumility (i.e., the tendency to be fair and genuine when dealing with others) from the HEXACO personality model (Ashton & Lee, 2007) is typically negatively related to antisocial, rule-violating, and selfish behavior (Zettler et al, 2020). Thus, humble and honest individuals might be more likely to comply with physical distancing regulations (Twardawski et al, 2021;Zettler et al, 2021) and less likely to engage in stockpiling (Columbus, 2021).…”

Does Lockdown Compliance Reflect a Latent Trait?

“…. "; 1 ¼ does not apply at all to 6 ¼ applies completely; O t ¼ .89) taken from Twardawski et al (2021).…”

“…That said, compliance is not a given: It is contingent on a number of macro- and meso-level factors. For instance, compliance requires trust in the government (Dohle et al, 2020; Han et al, 2021; Twardawski et al, 2021), and trust erodes if citizens presume that their political leaders have lost control over the pandemic, act unreliably, or put their self-interest over the nation’s collective interest (Fancourt et al, 2020). Second, people may become weary of complying with lockdown rules over time: Survey data from the Netherlands (Reinders Folmer et al, 2020a, 2020b) and Germany (Rosman et al, 2021) show that compliance rates plummeted during early summer 2020; and Gollwitzer, Platzer et al’s (2021) findings suggest that the same respondents who endorsed the current lockdown policies would not accept a potential long-term lockdown.…”

Effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic: Evidence from the 27 Brazilian states

“…In the United States, people holding more conspiracy beliefs at the beginning of the pandemic showed the lowest increase in social distancing [ 22 ]. Mandatory rules were also associated with individual traits: people with traits associated to anxiety, prosociality, and rule compliance were more likely to practice social distancing [ 23 ]. The duration of restrictions is also likely to influence social distancing levels: the longer the mandatory restrictions were in effect the less people complied with them [ 20 ].…”