Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/237463 
Year of Publication: 
2021
Series/Report no.: 
IDB Working Paper Series No. IDB-WP-1168
Publisher: 
Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), Washington, DC
Abstract: 
While effective preventive measures against COVID-19 are now widely known, many individuals fail to adopt them. This paper provides experimental evidence about one potentially important driver of compliance with social distancing: social norms. We asked each of 23,000 survey respondents in Mexico to predict how a fictional person would behave when faced with the choice about whether or not to attend a friend's birthday gathering. Every respondent was randomly assigned to one of four social norms conditions. Expecting that other people would attend the gathering and/or believing that other people approved of attending the gathering both increased the predicted probability that the fictional character would attend the gathering by 25% in comparison with a scenario where other people were not expected to attend nor to approve of attending. Our results speak to the potential effects of communication campaigns and media coverage of, compliance with, and normative views about COVID-19 preventive measures. They also suggest that policies aimed at modifying social norms or making existing ones salient could impact compliance.
Subjects: 
COVID19
Social norms
Social distancing
Normative expectations
Empirical expectations
Compliance
JEL: 
D91
D90
I12
I18
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by-nc-nd Logo
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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