The Covid-19 pandemic is having dramatic consequences across the world and has generated a public debate about how exposure to a pandemic environment affects social behavior: along with signs of increased solidarity such as people hand-making masks for others, we also observe selfish and antisocial behaviors such as harnessing of essential goods. This is a key question because prosocial behaviors are necessary to cope successfully with the pandemic, but the existing evidence provides no clear prediction regarding how prosociality adapts during such a negative shock. Using data from an online experiment with ~1k participants from southern Spain, we study how social behavior evolved in a six-day period in which Covid-19-associated deaths in Spain increased from 900 to above 3000. In our experiment, participants could earn lottery tickets for a €100-prize and decided whether to donate a fraction to a charity upon winning. We find that actual donations decreased in the period under study, particularly among older people—those who face higher mortality rates. Gender, another determinant of Covid-19-associated mortality, does not predict the decrease. In addition, while self-reported social concerns did not change in the same period, expectations about others’ donations decreased along with actual donations. The data suggest that expectations partially mediate the effect of exposure on behavioral change, but they cannot account for the effect of age. Since age is at the center of public debate about mortality while gender receives considerably less attention, our results point to the potential role of public information in behavioral adaptation.

Measuring risk preferences in the field is critical for policy, however, it can be expensive and may generate unequal payoffs due to bad luck. For instance, the commonly used measure of Holt and Laury (2002) relies on a dozen of lottery choices and payments which makes it time consuming and costly, but also raises moral concerns as a result of the unequal payments generated by the lotteries. We propose a short version of the Holt and Laury (2002) which produces in the lab (Spain) the same results as the long HL. Using the short HL in the field (Honduras and Nigeria), we observe that paying or not for the measurement of risk preferences produces the same findings. Our low-cost approach makes the measurement of risk preferences simpler, faster and cheaper in the lab and field.

We report data from an online experiment which allows us to study how generosity changed over a 6-day period during the initial explosive growth of the COVID-19 pandemic in Andalusia, Spain, while the country was under a strict lockdown. Participants ( n = 969) could donate a fraction of a €100 prize to an unknown charity. Our data are particularly rich in the age distribution and we complement them with daily public information about COVID-19-related deaths, infections and hospital admissions. We find correlational evidence that donations decreased in the period under study, particularly among older individuals. Our analysis of the mechanisms behind the detected decrease in generosity suggests that expectations about others' behaviour, perceived mortality risk and (alarming) information play a key—but independent—role for behavioural adaptation. These results indicate that social behaviour is quickly adjusted in response to the pandemic environment, possibly reflecting some form of selective prosociality.

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