Dissemin is shutting down on January 1st, 2025

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Nature Research, Nature Communications, 1(15), 2024

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-44999-5

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Changes in social norms during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic across 43 countries

Journal article published in 2024 by Giulia Andrighetto, Aron Szekely ORCID, Andrea Guido, Michele Gelfand, Jered Abernathy, Gizem Arikan ORCID, Zeynep Aycan, Shweta Bankar, Davide Barrera ORCID, Dana Basnight-Brown ORCID, Anabel Belaus ORCID, Elizaveta Berezina ORCID, Sheyla Blumen ORCID, Paweł Boski ORCID, Huyen Thi Thu Bui and other authors.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Abstract

AbstractThe emergence of COVID-19 dramatically changed social behavior across societies and contexts. Here we study whether social norms also changed. Specifically, we study this question for cultural tightness (the degree to which societies generally have strong norms), specific social norms (e.g. stealing, hand washing), and norms about enforcement, using survey data from 30,431 respondents in 43 countries recorded before and in the early stages following the emergence of COVID-19. Using variation in disease intensity, we shed light on the mechanisms predicting changes in social norm measures. We find evidence that, after the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, hand washing norms increased while tightness and punishing frequency slightly decreased but observe no evidence for a robust change in most other norms. Thus, at least in the short term, our findings suggest that cultures are largely stable to pandemic threats except in those norms, hand washing in this case, that are perceived to be directly relevant to dealing with the collective threat.