Abstract
Laws not only affect behavior due to changes in material payoffs, but they may also change the perception individuals have of social norms, either by shifting them directly or by providing information on these norms. Using detailed daily survey data and exploiting the introduction of lockdown measures in the UK in the context of the COVID-19 health crisis, we provide causal evidence that the law drastically changed the perception of the norms regarding social distancing behaviors. We show that this effect of laws on perceived norms is mostly driven by an informational channel and that the intervention made perceptions of social norms converge to the actual prevalent norm.
Highlights
Individual behavior is affected both by material incentives, in particular those codified in laws and by social sanctions or rewards, which are embodied in behavioral norms
Laws, by changing material payoffs, affect the behavioral norm understood as an equilibrium object: if fewer people take the condemned actions, the social stigma attached to these actions increases
In what follows we will examine whether this large impact of the law on mobility is correlated with changes in the perception of the social norm
Summary
Individual behavior is affected both by material incentives, in particular those codified in laws and by social sanctions or rewards, which are embodied in behavioral norms. The data contain daily information on respondents’ beliefs about four distinct social distancing measures: social gatherings, avoiding handshakes, closing stores and implementing a general curfew For each of these measures, respondents were asked about their perception of the social norm, whether they believe other individuals in their countries think that these measures should be adopted (see the supporting information S1 File, for detailed information about the variables and their definitions). In what follows we will examine whether this large impact of the law on mobility is correlated with changes in the perception of the social norm (it is worth noting that our data does not allow us to directly measure the relationship between mobility and norms; in the supporting information, S4 Table, we report tentative results based on questions in the survey about the intention to stay at home). This choice aims to preserve the generality of our results, as focusing on the subset of countries in which no change occurs raises the risk of conditioning the results on a selected set of countries whose policy response differs from the rest of the world
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