Prosociality Predicts Health Behaviors during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Campos‐Mercade, Pol; Meier, Armando N.; Schneider, Florian; Wengström, Erik

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3604094

Cited by 42 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 82 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Another interesting direction for future research is to link these types of giving with COVID-19 related health behaviors and engagement with government regulations. Recent studies in adults have namely demonstrated links between pandemic health behaviors and various forms of prosociality [39][40][41][42]. Finally, the novel Dictator Games provided a reliable measure of giving as was shown by significant correlations across time (i.e., r's .19-.57), although these correlations were lower than those of studies where Dictator Games to anonymous others were repeatedly administered in the same sitting (i.e., r's .70-.91).…”

Section: Peri-pandemic Giving To Othersmentioning

confidence: 99%

A daily diary study on adolescents’ mood, empathy, and prosocial behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic

et al. 2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Adolescence is a formative phase for social development. The COVID-19 pandemic and associated regulations have led to many changes in adolescents' lives, including limited opportunities for social interactions. The current exploratory study investigated the effect of the first weeks of COVID-19 pandemic lockdown on Dutch adolescents' (N = 53 with attrition, N = 36 without attrition) mood, empathy, and prosocial behavior. Longitudinal analyses comparing pre-pandemic measures to a three-week peri-pandemic daily diary study showed (i) decreases in empathic concern, opportunities for prosocial actions, and tension, (ii) stable levels of social value orientation, altruism, and dire prosociality, and (iii) increased levels of perspective-taking and vigor during the first weeks of lockdown. Second, this study investigated peri-pandemic effects of familiarity, need, and deservedness on giving behavior. To this end, we utilized novel hypothetical Dictator Games with ecologically valid targets associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Adolescents showed higher levels of giving to a friend (a familiar other, about 51% of the total share), a doctor in a hospital (deserving target, 78%), and individuals with COVID-19 or a poor immune system (targets in need, 69 and 63%, respectively) compared to an unfamiliar peer (39%) This suggests that during the pandemic need and deservedness had a greater influence on adolescent giving than familiarity. Overall, this study demonstrates detrimental effects of the first weeks of lockdown on adolescents' empathic concern and opportunities for prosocial actions, which are important predictors of healthy socio-emotional development. However, adolescents also showed marked resilience and a willingness to benefit others as a result of the lockdown, as evidenced by improved perspective-taking and mood, and high sensitivity to need and deservedness in giving to others.

show abstract

Section: Peri-pandemic Giving To Othersmentioning

confidence: 99%

A daily diary study on adolescents’ mood, empathy, and prosocial behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic

et al. 2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Consequently, in recent years behavioral scientists have started using norm-based interventions to promote desirable behavior in economic experiments (D'Adda et al, 2017;Bicchieri & Xiao, 2009;Bilancini et al, 2020;Capraro & Rand, 2018;Capraro & Vanzo, 2019;Eriksson et al, 2017;Krupka & Weber, 2009;Krupka & Weber, 2013;Kimbrough & Vostroknutov, 2016) as well as in the field (Agerström et al, 2016;Croson et al, 2010;Ferraro & Price, 2013;Frey & Meier, 2004;Goldstein et al, 2008;Allcott, 2011;Hallsworth et al, 2017;Allcott & Kessler, 2019). Moreover, several recent works have highlighted the social motives behind COVID-19 prevention behavior (Campos-Mercade et al, 2020;Lees et al, 2020;Raihani & de-Wit, 2020). This suggests that norm-based interventions may be useful in promoting pandemic responses (Van Bavel et al, 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The effect of norm-based messages on reading and understanding COVID-19 pandemic response governmental rules

Bilancini¹,

Boncinelli²,

Capraro³

et al. 2020

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The new coronavirus disease (COVID-19) threatens the lives of millions of people around the world, making it the largest health threat in recent times. Billions of people around the world are asked to adhere to strict shelter-in-place rules, finalised to slow down the spread of the virus. Appeals and messages are being used by leaders and policy-makers to promote pandemic response. Given the stakes at play, it is thus important for social scientists to explore which messages are most effective in promoting pandemic response. In fact, some papers in the last month have explored the effect of several messages on people’s intentions to engage in pandemic response behaviour. In this paper, we make two contributions. First, we explore the effect of messages on people’s actual engagement, and not on intentions. Specifically, our dependent variables are the level of understanding of official COVID-19 pandemic response governmental informative panels, measured through comprehension questions, and the time spent on reading these rules. Second, we test a novel set of appeals built through the theory of norms. One message targets the personal norm (what people think is the right thing to do), one targets the descriptive norm (what people think others are doing), and one targets the injunctive norm (what people think others approve or disapprove of). Our experiment is conducted online with a representative (with respect to gender, age, and location) sample of Italians. Norms are made salient using a flier. We find that norm-based fliers had no effect on comprehension and on time spent on the panels. These results suggest that norm-based interventions through fliers have very little impact on people’s reading and understanding of COVID-19 pandemic response governmental rules.

show abstract

“…We believe such spillovers to be less relevant for the socioeconomic variables, which we asked about after the choice experiment.7 We also asked a set of questions measuring their risk, time, and social preferences using the well-established questions fromFalk et al (2018). These questions are used in another research project unrelated to the choice experiment(Campos-Mercade et al, 2020).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Individual Welfare Costs of Stay at Home Policies

Andersson

Campos‐Mercade

Carlsson³

et al. 2020

SSRN Journal

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper reports the results of a choice experiment designed to estimate the private welfare costs of stay-at-home policies during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study is conducted on a large and representative sample of the Swedish population. The results suggest that the welfare cost of a one-month stay-at-home policy, restricting non-working hours away from home, amounts to 9.1 percent of qSweden's monthly GDP. The cost can be interpreted as 29,600 quality-adjusted life years (QALYs), which roughly corresponds to between 3,700 and 8,000 COVID-19 fatalities. Moreover, we find that stricter and longer lockdowns are disproportionately more costly than more lenient ones. This result indicates that strict stay-at-home policies are likely to be cost-effective only if they slow the spread of the disease much more than more lenient ones.

show abstract

Prosociality Predicts Health Behaviors during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Cited by 42 publications

References 82 publications

A daily diary study on adolescents’ mood, empathy, and prosocial behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic

A daily diary study on adolescents’ mood, empathy, and prosocial behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic

The effect of norm-based messages on reading and understanding COVID-19 pandemic response governmental rules

The Individual Welfare Costs of Stay at Home Policies

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About