Science skepticism reduced compliance with COVID-19 shelter-in-place policies in the United States

Abstract

Physical distancing reduces transmission risks and slows the spread of COVID-19. Yet compliance with shelter-in-place policies issued by local and regional governments in the United States was uneven and may have been influenced by science skepticism and attitudes towards topics of scientific consensus. Using county-day measures of physical distancing derived from cell phone location data, we demonstrate that the proportion of people who stayed at home after shelter-in-place policies went into effect in March and April 2020 in the United States was significantly lower in counties with a high concentration of science skeptics. These results are robust to controlling for other potential drivers of differential physical distancing, such as political partisanship, income, education and COVID severity. Our findings suggest that public health interventions that take local attitudes towards science into account in their messaging may be more effective.

Learning from deregulation: The asymmetric impact of lockdown and reopening on risky behavior during COVID‐19

“…We find no evidence of a response to stay‐at‐home orders across all three Yelp outcomes. These findings are consistent with emerging research on the economic impact of stay‐at‐home orders, including Chudik et al (2020), Brzezinski, Deiana, et al (2020), Brzezinski, Kecht, et al (2020), Gupta et al (2020), Goolsbee and Syverson (2021), Cronin and Evans (2020), and Farboodi et al (2020). We also find that reopening decisions are associated with a meaningful increase in activity across all outcomes, ranging from a 4.1 percentage point increase in the broadest SafeGraph outcome, to a nearly 25 percentage point increase in reservations placed via the Yelp Reservations platform.…”

How neurons, norms, and institutions shape group cooperation

“…While governmental trust was linked to greater compliance in some nations, it was actually associated with less compliance in countries like the United States and Brazil, where government and scientific authorities were frequently at odds with each other in terms of how to respond to the crisis. Likewise, science skepticism in the US (as indexed by county-level disbelief in human-caused global warming) was associated with less physical distancing early during the pandemic, over and above effects of political partisanship, as well as local rates of infection and mortality (Brzezinski, Kecht, Van Dijcke, & Wright, 2021).…”

Incorporating Fuzzy Cognitive Inference for Vaccine Hesitancy Measuring

“…Second, improving public scientific knowledge is vital in eliminating vaccine hesitancy. Existing studies have illustrated that people in countries with good scientific trust hold better vaccine confidence [26]. Therefore, the promotion of scientific awareness of the public contributes to the reduction of vaccine hesitancy.…”