Pandemic Rewrote Only One Social Rule: Hand Washing, Study Finds
A global survey of 30,000 people across 43 countries found that COVID-19 fundamentally changed only one social norm—hand washing—while leaving cultural attitudes about punishment and general rule-following largely intact. The finding challenges assumptions that collective threats automatically tighten social discipline, suggesting policymakers must target interventions to threats people perceive as directly relevant to survive.
Originaltitel: Changes in social norms during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic across 43 countries
<p>The 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. Tightness-looseness theory predicts that social norms strengthen following threat. Here the authors test this and find that, after the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, hand washing norms increased, but no evidence was observed for a robust change in most other norms.</p>