Amsterdam Law School, Center for Law and Behavior, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Arizona State University, Phoenix, Arizona, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2021 Sep 24;16(9):e0257945. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0257945. eCollection 2021.
A crucial question in the governance of infectious disease outbreaks is how to ensure that people continue to adhere to mitigation measures for the longer duration. The present paper examines this question by means of a set of cross-sectional studies conducted in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic, in May, June, and July of 2020. Using stratified samples that mimic the demographic characteristics of the U.S. population, it seeks to understand to what extent Americans continued to adhere to social distancing measures in the period after the first lockdown ended. Moreover, it seeks to uncover which variables sustained (or undermined) adherence across this period. For this purpose, we examined a broad range of factors, relating to people's (1) knowledge and understanding of the mitigation measures, (2) perceptions of their costs and benefits, (3) perceptions of legitimacy and procedural justice, (4) personal factors, (5) social environment, and (6) practical circumstances. Our findings reveal that adherence was chiefly shaped by three major factors: respondents adhered more when they (a) had greater practical capacity to adhere, (b) morally agreed more with the measures, and (c) perceived the virus as a more severe health threat. Adherence was shaped to a lesser extent by impulsivity, knowledge of social distancing measures, opportunities for violating, personal costs, and descriptive social norms. The results also reveal, however, that adherence declined across this period, which was partly explained by changes in people's moral alignment, threat perceptions, knowledge, and perceived social norms. These findings show that adherence originates from a broad range of factors that develop dynamically across time. Practically these insights help to improve pandemic governance, as well as contributing theoretically to the study of compliance and the way that rules come to shape behavior.
传染病暴发治理中的一个关键问题是如何确保人们在更长时间内继续坚持缓解措施。本文通过在 2020 年 5 月、6 月和 7 月期间在美国进行的一系列横断面研究来探讨这个问题。该研究使用模仿美国人口特征的分层样本，旨在了解美国人在首次封锁结束后的一段时间内继续遵守社会距离措施的程度。此外，它还试图揭示哪些变量在这段时间内维持（或破坏）了遵守情况。为此，我们研究了广泛的因素，这些因素与人们的（1）对缓解措施的了解和理解，（2）对其成本和收益的看法，（3）对合法性和程序正义的看法，（4）个人因素，（5）社会环境和（6）实际情况有关。我们的研究结果表明，遵守情况主要受到三个主要因素的影响：当受访者（a）有更大的遵守能力，（b）在道德上更同意这些措施，以及（c）认为病毒对健康构成更严重的威胁时，他们更愿意遵守。遵守情况在一定程度上受到冲动、对社交距离措施的了解、违反机会、个人成本和描述性社会规范的影响。然而，研究结果还表明，遵守情况在此期间有所下降，这在一定程度上可以解释为人们的道德取向、威胁感知、知识和感知社会规范的变化。这些发现表明，遵守源于一系列广泛的因素，这些因素随着时间的推移而动态发展。从实践的角度来看，这些见解有助于改善大流行治理，从理论上为研究合规性以及规则如何塑造行为做出贡献。
