Effect of Covid-19 on Social Norms’ Change and Cooperation

One key lesson that can be learn from the management of COVID-19 is that top-down non-pharmaceutical interventions like population lockdown, school closures, and centralized quarantine policies, have been effective in reducing the rate of contagion but to keep the transmission rate under control, when these costly measures are lifted, there is a need to develop bottom-up measures, such as those based on the establishment of appropriate social norms.

Social norms have proven to be important in solving social dilemmas, situations in which a group of people must work together to achieve a collective goal, but no one has incentives to act alone. Many contemporary challenges involve social dilemmas, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, antibiotic resistance.

Understanding how appropriate norms form and motivate people to cooperate is thus crucial.Here we propose a long-term study of how threat is impacting the strength of norms and with what consequence on the ability of people to solve social dilemmas. We study these questions with a difference-in-difference design.

We use the measures from a 30-day online experiment we conducted before the spread of COVID-19, and run an additional wave (wave 2). A third wave following the decline of the pandemic will be run to test how resilient the effects are.

This knowledge is critical to understanding how societies respond to future global crises, requiring collective behavioral change, in particular new pandemics and climate change.