ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Working memory capacity predicts individual differences in social-distancing compliance during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 59 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
59 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 115 citations in OpenAlex.
- To comply or not comply? A latent profile analysis of behaviours and attitudes during the COVID-19 pandemic.PloS one · 2021Pooled it
- The Association of Cerebrovascular Disease with Adverse Outcomes in COVID-19 Patients: A Meta-Analysis Based on Adjusted Effect Estimates.Journal of stroke and cerebrovascular diseases : the official journal of National Stroke Association · 2020Pooled it
- Personality traits explain levels of norm compliance during the COVID-19 pandemic.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- The Relationship Between TikTok Usage and Executive Function Is Mediated by Problematic Social Media Use.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- A global survey on the associations between the lockdown group, free memory recall and emotional responses during the COVID-19 lockdown.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The role of the parahippocampal cortex in memory consolidation for scenes.Learning & memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.) · 2025Article
- Mental health and socio-cognitive predictors of adherence to COVID-19 social distancing rules in adolescents in England.Heliyon · 2025Article
- The role of personality traits and emotional intelligence in the evaluation of the benefits and costs of social distancing during a pandemic outbreak.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- A measure of reliability convergence to select and optimize cognitive tasks for individual differences research.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Compliance with Health Recommendations and Vaccine Hesitancy During the COVID Pandemic in Nine Countries.Prevention science : the official journal of the Society for Prevention Research · 2024Article
- The Relation Between Attention and Memory.Annual review of psychology · 2024Review
- Cognitive influences on biosecurity measure compliance during a global pandemic.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Personality factors and pandemic-related behaviors.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Task-related oxygenation in the prefrontal cortex as a function of mask-wearing frequency: An empirical test using functional near-infrared spectroscopy.Neuroimage. Reports · 2023Article
- Familiarity enhances mnemonic precision but impairs mnemonic accuracy in visual working memory.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2023Article
- Effortfulness of visual working memory: Gauged by physical exertion.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2023Article
- Cognitive predictors of COVID-19 mitigation behaviors in vaccinated and unvaccinated general population members.Vaccine · 2023Article
- Sustained attention required for effective dimension-based retro-cue benefit in visual working memory.Journal of vision · 2023Article
- Adherence to COVID-19 Protective Measures in a Longitudinal Sample of Male Youth.International journal of behavioral medicine · 2023Article
- Self-esteem influences the willingness to engage in COVID-19 prevention behavior and persuasion efficacy.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2023Article
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3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
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Abstract
Noncompliance with social distancing during the early stage of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic poses a great challenge to the public health system. These noncompliance behaviors partly reflect people's concerns for the inherent costs of social distancing while discounting its public health benefits. We propose that this oversight may be associated with the limitation in one's mental capacity to simultaneously retain multiple pieces of information in working memory (WM) for rational decision making that leads to social-distancing compliance. We tested this hypothesis in 850 United States residents during the first 2 wk following the presidential declaration of national emergency because of the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that participants' social-distancing compliance at this initial stage could be predicted by individual differences in WM capacity, partly due to increased awareness of benefits over costs of social distancing among higher WM capacity individuals. Critically, the unique contribution of WM capacity to the individual differences in social-distancing compliance could not be explained by other psychological and socioeconomic factors (e.g., moods, personality, education, and income levels). Furthermore, the critical role of WM capacity in social-distancing compliance can be generalized to the compliance with another set of rules for social interactions, namely the fairness norm, in Western cultures. Collectively, our data reveal contributions of a core cognitive process underlying social-distancing compliance during the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting a potential cognitive venue for developing strategies to mitigate a public health crisis.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.