Wearing a mask-For yourself or for others? Behavioral correlates of mask wearing among COVID-19 frontline workers.

Ankush Asri,Juergen Muser,Joerg D Leuppi,Franziska Föllmi-Heusi,Baiba Renerte,Dominik Schuler,Viola Asri,Reto Nüesch,Urs Fischbacher,Pablo Brañas-Garza

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0253621

Ankush Asri, Juergen Muser + Show 8 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0253621

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Abstract

Human behavior can have effects on oneself and externalities on others. Mask wearing is such a behavior in the current pandemic. What motivates people to wear face masks in public when mask wearing is voluntary or not enforced? Which benefits should the policy makers rather emphasize in information campaigns—the reduced chances of getting the SARS-CoV-2 virus (benefits for oneself) or the reduced chances of transmitting the virus (benefits for others in the society)? In this paper, we link measured risk preferences and other-regarding preferences to mask wearing habits among 840 surveyed employees of two large Swiss hospitals. We find that the leading mask-wearing motivations change with age: While for older people, mask wearing habits are best explained by their self-regarding risk preferences, younger people are also motivated by other-regarding concerns. Our results are robust to different specifications including linear probability models, probit models and Lasso covariate selection models. Our findings thus allow drawing policy implications for effectively communicating public-health recommendations to frontline workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Highlights

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the novel SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak a pandemic on the 11th of March 2020 [1], and face masks swiftly became one of the most visible symbols of the pandemic [2, 3]
As the motivations for mask wearing may vary by age, we further note that in general younger employees report wearing a mask less often than older employees: 54.9% compared to 69.7% in the more-affected region (p-value
We have demonstrated the importance of ambidextrous strategies for communicating public health recommendations during the COVID-19 pandemic

Summary

Introduction

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the novel SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak a pandemic on the 11th of March 2020 [1], and face masks swiftly became one of the most visible symbols of the pandemic [2, 3]. The emerging consensus is that mask wearing reduces the chances of both catching and spreading the virus and protects both the wearer herself and other people around her [4,5,6,7]. The studies on efficacy of mask wearing rely on the assumptions that people wear masks—and wear them correctly [13]. COVID-19 provides different intrinsic motivations for mask wearing for different.

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