Promoting Social Distancing in a Pandemic: Beyond the Good Intentions

Abstract

Background: Reminders to promote social distancing have been ubiquitous throughout the COVID-19 crisis, but little is known about their effectiveness. Existing studies find positive impacts on intentions to comply, but no evidence exists of actual behavioural change.Methods: We conducted a randomised trial with a large sample of Danish residents to test different versions of a reminder to stay home at the peak of the crisis. We measure impacts on both intentions to comply and subsequent actions (whether subjects report having stayed home in a follow-up survey).Findings: We find that the reminder increases intentions to stay home when it emphasises the consequences of non-compliance for the subjects themselves or their families, while it has no impact when the emphasis is on other people or the country as a whole. Changes in intentions, however, translate into weaker changes in subsequent behaviour that are not statistically significant. This is consistent with the existence of important intention-to-action gaps. People in poor health, however, do react to the reminder and are significantly more likely to stay home after receiving it.Interpretation: Our findings show that reminders can be useful to protect groups at risk by increasing their own compliance with social distancing. Such a tool, however, is a blunt instrument when it comes to changing the behaviour of those who face limited personal risks but could spread the disease.Registry Number: AEARCTR-0005582.Funding: The study was funded by the Center for Economic Behaviour and Inequality, the Department of Economics, and the Department of Public Health at the University of Copenhagen.Declaration of Interests: The authors have no competing interests, or other interests that might be perceived to influence the interpretation of the article.Ethics Approval Statement: The project was pre-approved by the ethical committee of the Department of Economics at the University of Copenhagen and we have complied with all relevant ethical regulations. We have obtained informed consent from all participants. With regard to issues of data protection, we obtained the approval of the Social Sciences Faculty Secretariat of the University of Copenhagen (Reference no. 514-0130/20-2000), stating that processing of personal data in the project is in accordance with the rules of the General Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (GDPR).