Do Cues Regarding the Behavior of Others Lead to Normative Behavior during the COVID-19 Pandemic?

ABSTRACT

During the COVID-19 pandemic, what impact does the social context in offering incentives have on people's normative behavior? This paper focuses on the effect of normative framing and examines whether cues signaling other people's respect or disrespect for norms affect normative behavior with the Japanese case study of refraining from going out under the pandemic situation. Drawing on Goal Framing theory, which predicts the effect of norms depending on the salience of normative frame, it is argued that normative respect or disrespect cues that are related to or unrelated to a targeted norm have influences on normative behavior (same norm effect/cross-norm effect). We tested this using data from an online survey experiment in which respondents were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. The statistical results showed that all treatments had no significant effects on the intention to refrain from going out in the OLS regression, whereas normative disrespect cues treatments had significant negative effects only for the low quantile respondents in quantile regression. It partially supported the same-norm effect and the cross-norm effect. These findings suggest that the social context that policymakers offer incentives also matters for eliciting more cooperative and normative behavior under the pandemic situation. © 2021 Japanese Association for Mathematical Sociology. All rights reserved.