The COVID-19 pandemic and changes in social behavior: Protective face masks reduce deliberate social distancing preferences while leaving automatic avoidance behavior unaffected

Abstract

Protective face masks were one of the central measures to counteract viral transmission in the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior research indicates that face masks impact various aspects of social cognition, such as emotion recognition and social evaluation. Whether protective masks also influence social avoidance behavior is less clear. Our project assessed direct and indirect measures of social avoidance tendencies towards masked and unmasked faces in two experiments with 311 participants during the first half of 2021. Two interventions were used in half of the participants from each sample (Experiment 1: protective face masks; Experiment 2: a disease prime video) to decrease or increase the salience of the immediate contagion threat. In the direct social avoidance measure, which asked for the deliberate decision to approach or avoid a person in a hypothetical social encounter, participants showed an increased willingness to approach masked as opposed to unmasked faces across experiments. This effect was further related to interindividual differences in pandemic threat perception in both samples. In the indirect measure, which assessed automatic social approach and avoidance tendencies, we neither observed an approach advantage towards masked faces nor an avoidance advantage for unmasked faces. Thus, while the absence of protective face masks may have led to increased deliberate social avoidance during the pandemic, no such effect was observed on automatic regulation of behavior, thus indicating the relative robustness of this latter behavior against changes in superordinate social norms.

The social factors behind the mask: contextual effects on trait impressions from faces wearing a face mask

“…A further limitation the present work is that we only relied on explicit reports about trait impressions from faces. There is some evidence that the presence (vs absence) of face masks may affect deliberate behavioral intentions but not necessarily more automatic responses (Diekhof et al, 2024 ), thus raising the question about whether the contextual modulations observed in the present studies can also be detected through tasks that assess less controlled responses (e.g., priming tasks; Wentura & Degner, 2010 ).…”

“…Hence, we employed the same 5 traits included in Study 1 and 2 additional traits. Attractiveness and willingness to interact were included as further traits employed in relevant previous work about trait impressions from faces (e.g., Sutherland et al, 2013 ), and more specifically in several previous studies about the impact of face masks on impression formation (e.g., Diekhof et al, 2024 ; Hies & Lewis, 2022 ; Kühne et al, 2022 ; Oldmeadow & Koch, 2021 ). The presentation order of the faces was randomized.…”