A guilt-free strategy increases self-reported non-compliance with COVID-19 preventive measures: Experimental evidence from 12 countries

Studies of citizens' compliance with COVID-19 preventive measures routinely rely on survey data. While such data are essential, public health restrictions provide clear signals of what is socially desirable in this context, creating a potential source of response bias in self-reported measures...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2021-04, Vol.16 (4), p.e0249914-e0249914
Main Authors: Daoust, Jean-François, Bélanger, Éric, Dassonneville, Ruth, Lachapelle, Erick, Nadeau, Richard, Becher, Michael, Brouard, Sylvain, Foucault, Martial, Hönnige, Christoph, Stegmueller, Daniel
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Behavior
Bias
Biology and Life Sciences
Compliance
Coronaviruses
COVID-19
COVID-19 - prevention & control
COVID-19 - psychology
Disease Transmission, Infectious - prevention & control
Economics and Finance
Editing
Epidemics
Female
Funding
Guidelines
Guilt
Humanities and Social Sciences
Humans
Male
Medical research
Medicine and Health Sciences
Middle Aged
Pandemics
Patient Compliance - psychology
People and places
Political aspects
Polls & surveys
Prevention
Psychological aspects
Public health
Research and Analysis Methods
Reviews
SARS-CoV-2 - isolation & purification
Self Report - statistics & numerical data
Social distancing
Social Sciences
Surveys and Questionnaires
United Kingdom
Viruses
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Studies of citizens' compliance with COVID-19 preventive measures routinely rely on survey data. While such data are essential, public health restrictions provide clear signals of what is socially desirable in this context, creating a potential source of response bias in self-reported measures of compliance. In this research, we examine whether the results of a guilt-free strategy recently proposed to lessen this constraint are generalizable across twelve countries, and whether the treatment effect varies across subgroups. Our findings show that the guilt-free strategy is a useful tool in every country included, increasing respondents' proclivity to report non-compliance by 9 to 16 percentage points. This effect holds for different subgroups based on gender, age and education. We conclude that the inclusion of this strategy should be the new standard for survey research that aims to provide crucial data on the current pandemic.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0249914