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

Abstract

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.

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

“…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 – 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).…”

Improving preventive health behaviors in the COVID-19 crisis: a messaging intervention in a large nationally representative sample

“…In another study, there was no difference in self-reported intentions to wear a face covering between messages highlighting that the coronavirus is a threat to "your community" compared to "you" (26). Norm-based messages also had no impact on reading and understanding COVID-19 governmental rules (27).…”

“…In line with these findings, recent research has found that framing COVID preventive measures as pro-social rather than selfinterested increased participants' intentions to adopt preventive behaviors (24). However, this effect is not systematic and was not replicated in other studies (24)(25)(26)(27)(28).…”

Exposure to the Covid-19 pandemic and generosity

“…Naturally, the Covid-19 pandemic has already stimulated other studies. For example, Bartos et al (2020) report that the pandemic has increased hostility toward foreigners and Bilancini et al (2020) find no effect of norm-based interventions on individual pandemic response. The decreased generosity detected in our study might partially explain these results.…”