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. 2024 Feb 16;15(1):1436.
doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-44999-5.

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

Giulia Andrighetto #  1   2   3 , Aron Szekely #  4   5 , Andrea Guido  4   6   7 , Michele Gelfand  8 , Jered Abernathy  9 , Gizem Arikan  10 , Zeynep Aycan  11   12 , Shweta Bankar  13 , Davide Barrera  5   14 , Dana Basnight-Brown  15 , Anabel Belaus  16   17 , Elizaveta Berezina  18 , Sheyla Blumen  19 , Paweł Boski  20 , Huyen Thi Thu Bui  21 , Juan Camilo Cárdenas  22   23 , Đorđe Čekrlija  24   25 , Mícheál de Barra  26 , Piyanjali de Zoysa  27 , Angela Dorrough  28 , Jan B Engelmann  29 , Hyun Euh  30 , Susann Fiedler  31 , Olivia Foster-Gimbel  32 , Gonçalo Freitas  33 , Marta Fülöp  34   35 , Ragna B Gardarsdottir  36 , Colin Mathew Hugues D Gill  18   37 , Andreas Glöckner  28 , Sylvie Graf  38 , Ani Grigoryan  39 , Katarzyna Growiec  20 , Hirofumi Hashimoto  40 , Tim Hopthrow  41 , Martina Hřebíčková  38 , Hirotaka Imada  42 , Yoshio Kamijo  43 , Hansika Kapoor  44 , Yoshihisa Kashima  45 , Narine Khachatryan  39 , Natalia Kharchenko  46 , Diana León  47 , Lisa M Leslie  32 , Yang Li  48 , Kadi Liik  49 , Marco Tullio Liuzza  50 , Angela T Maitner  51 , Pavan Mamidi  13 , Michele McArdle  10 , Imed Medhioub  52 , Maria Luisa Mendes Teixeira  53 , Sari Mentser  54 , Francisco Morales  55 , Jayanth Narayanan  56 , Kohei Nitta  57 , Ravit Nussinson  58   59 , Nneoma G Onyedire  60 , Ike E Onyishi  60 , Evgeny Osin  61 , Seniha Özden  11 , Penny Panagiotopoulou  62 , Oleksandr Pereverziev  63 , Lorena R Perez-Floriano  64 , Anna-Maija Pirttilä-Backman  65 , Marianna Pogosyan  66 , Jana Raver  67 , Cecilia Reyna  16 , Ricardo Borges Rodrigues  68 , Sara Romanò  14 , Pedro P Romero  69   70 , Inari Sakki  65 , Angel Sánchez  71   72 , Sara Sherbaji  51   73 , Brent Simpson  9 , Lorenzo Spadoni  74 , Eftychia Stamkou  75 , Giovanni A Travaglino  42 , Paul A M Van Lange  76 , Fiona Fira Winata  77 , Rizqy Amelia Zein  77 , Qing-Peng Zhang  78 , Kimmo Eriksson  6   79   80
Affiliations

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

Giulia Andrighetto et al. Nat Commun. .

Abstract

The 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.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1. Changes in outcomes (Wave 2 - Wave 1).
(A) tightness-looseness, (B) situation-specific norms, (C) metanorms, (D) punishing frequency and (E) hand washing norms. Tightness and punishing frequency slightly decrease  while hand washing norms increase after the emergence of the COVID−19 pandemic. Other social and metanorms display non-robust changes. Change in appropriateness items is computed by scaling the average change in each country to the maximum possible change. Hence, the index can take values from −1 to +1. Red and black dots depict sampled cities; red dots represent cities sampled in both waves while black dots refer to cities only sampled in Wave 2. Indonesia is not included in hand washing norm data because of a mistake in the survey translation (see Methods).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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