Changes in social norms during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic across 43 countries
journal contribution
posted on 2025-04-16, 14:19 authored by Giulia Andrighetto, Aron Szekely, Andrea Guido, Michele Gelfand, Jered Abernathy, Gizem Arikan, Zeynep AycanZeynep Aycan, Shweta Bankar, Davide Barrera, Dana Basnight-Brown, Anabel Belaus, Elizaveta Berezina, Sheyla Blumen, Pawel Boski, Huyen Thi Thi Bui, Juan Camilo Cárdenas, Đorđe Čekrlija, Mícheál de Barra, Piyanjali de Zoysa, Angela Dorrough, Jan B. Engelmann, Hyun Euh, Susann Fiedler, Olivia Foster-Gimbel, Gonçalo Freitas, Marta Fülöp, Ragna B. Gardarsdottir, Colin Mathew Hugues D. Gill, Andreas Glöckner, Sylvie Graf, Ani Grigoryan, Katarzyna Growiec, Hirofumi Hashimoto, Tim Hopthrow, Martina Hřebíčková, Hirotaka Imada, Yoshio Kamijo, Hansika Kapoor, Yoshihisa Kashima, Narine Khachatryan, Natalia Kharchenko, Diana León, Lisa M. Leslie, Yang Li, Kadi Liik, Marco Tullio Liuzza, Angela T. Maitner, Pavan Mamidi, Michele McArdle, Imed Medhioub, Maria Luisa Mendes Teixeira, Sari Mentser, Francisco Morales, Jayanth Narayanan, Kohei Nitta, Ravit Nussinson, Nneoma G. Onyedire, Ike E. Onyishi, Evgeny Osin, Seniha Özden, Penny Panagiotopoulou, Oleksandr Pereverziev, Lorena R. Perez-Floriano, Anna-Maija Pirttilä-Backman, Marianna Pogosyan, Jana Raver, Cecilia Reyna, Ricardo Borges Rodrigues, Sara Romanò, Pedro P. Romero, Inari Sakki, Angel Sánchez, Sara Sherbaji, Brent Simpson, Lorenzo Spadoni, Eftychia Stamkou, Giovanni A. Travaglino, Paul A. M. Van Lange, Fiona Fira Winata, Rizqy Amelia Zein, Qing-peng Zhang, Kimmo ErikssonThe emergence of COVID-19 dramatically changed social behavior across societies and contexts. Here we study whether social norms also changed. Specifically, we study this question for cultural tightness (the degree to which societies generally have strong norms), specific social norms (e.g. stealing, hand washing), and norms about enforcement, using survey data from 30,431 respondents in 43 countries recorded before and in the early stages following the emergence of COVID-19. Using variation in disease intensity, we shed light on the mechanisms predicting changes in social norm measures. We find evidence that, after the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, hand washing norms increased while tightness and punishing frequency slightly decreased but observe no evidence for a robust change in most other norms. Thus, at least in the short term, our findings suggest that cultures are largely stable to pandemic threats except in those norms, hand washing in this case, that are perceived to be directly relevant to dealing with the collective threat.
Funding
Knut and Wallenberg Grant “How do human norms form and change?” 2016.0167. (G.An.)
The Swedish Research Council grant “Norms & Risk: Do social norms help dealing with collective threats” 2021-06271 (G.An.)
Ministero dell’Istruzione dell’Università e della Ricerca, PRIN 2017, prot. 20178TRM3F (D.B.)
Universidad de Los Andes, Fondo Vicerrectoría de Investigaciones (J.-C.C.)
Ministry of Innovation and Technology of Hungary, National Research, Development and Innovation Fund NKFIH-OTKA K135963 (M.F.)
Grant 23-061770 S of the Czech Science Foundation (M.H. and S.G.)
RVO: 68081740 of the Institute of Psychology, Czech Academy of Sciences (M.H. and S.G.)
RA Science Committee, research project N.20TTSH-070 (A.Gr. and N.Khac.)
Open University of Israel, 511687 (R.N.). HSE University Basic Research Program (E.O.)
Project BASIC (PID2022-141802NB-I00) funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by “ERDF A way of making Europe” (A.Sá.)
US Army Research Office Grant W911NF-19-1-910281 (B.S.)
Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, 019.183SG.001 (E.S.)
Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, VI.Veni.201 G.013 (E.S.)
European Commission, Horizon 2020-ID 870827 (E.S.)
Secret Power: Investigating the Legitimization of Criminal Governance: Group Comparisons and Within-Individual Dynamics
UK Research and Innovation
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School
- Loughborough Business School
Published in
Nature CommunicationsVolume
15Issue
1Publisher
Springer NatureVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
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© The Author(s)Publisher statement
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.Acceptance date
2024-01-12Publication date
2024-12-01Copyright date
2024eISSN
2041-1723Publisher version
Language
- en
Depositor
Prof Zeynep Aycan. Deposit date: 6 November 2024Article number
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