ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Masks as a moral symbol: Masks reduce wearers' deviant behavior in China during COVID-19.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed, 23 citations in OpenAlex.
- Economic inequality fosters unethical behaviour by promoting the perception of immoral and competitive normative climates.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2026Article
- Embodied Impact of Facial Coverings: Triggering Self-Expression Needs to Drive Conspicuous Preferences.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Longitudinal association between psychological distress and mask-wearing post COVID-19 among psychiatric outpatients in Japan.PloS one · 2025Article
- How facemasks shape trust in social interactions.PloS one · 2025Article
- Threats to personal control fuel similarity attraction.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Veiled to Express: Uncovering the Effect of Mask-Wearing on Voice Behavior in the Workplace.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Does wearing a mask promote consumer uniqueness seeking?Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Masks as a moral symbol: Masks reduce wearers' deviant behavior in China during COVID-19.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Since the outbreak of COVID-19, mask wearing has become a global phenomenon. How do masks influence wearers' behavior in everyday life? We examine the effect of masks on wearers' deviant behavior in China, where mask wearing is mostly a public-health issue rather than a political issue. Drawing on behavioral ethics research, we test two competing hypotheses: (a) masks disinhibit wearers' deviant behavior by increasing their sense of anonymity and (b) masks are a moral symbol that reduces wearers' deviant behavior by heightening their moral awareness. The latter hypothesis was consistently supported by 10 studies (including direct replications) using mixed methods (e.g., traffic camera recording analysis, observational field studies, experiments, and natural field experiment) and different measures of deviant behavior (e.g., running a red light, bike parking in no-parking zones, cheating for money, and deviant behavior in the library). Our research (
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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.