ArticleScientific reports2023
Descriptive norms caused increases in mask wearing during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Article in Scientific reports, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Beyond social cues: the normative influence of social referents on COVID-19 vaccine compliance among Latino day laborers.Journal of behavioral medicine · 2026Article
- A new experimental approach to manipulate social identity and social norms about protective behaviors in a virtual social environment.BMC psychology · 2026Article
- Personality traits explain levels of norm compliance during the COVID-19 pandemic.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
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- Understanding the interplay between epidemiological and social cognitve drivers of behaviour change during the Covid-19 pandemic.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- A norm about harvest division is maintained by a desire to follow tradition, not by social policing.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Vaccine hesitancy and trust in sub-Saharan Africa.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Effectiveness and context dependency of social norm interventions: five field experiments on nudging pro-environmental and pro-social behavior.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Article
- The contribution of risk perception and social norms to reported preventive behaviour against selected vector-borne diseases in Guyana.Scientific reports · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
Human sociality is governed by two types of social norms: injunctive norms, which prescribe what people ought to do, and descriptive norms, which reflect what people actually do. The process by which these norms emerge and their causal influences on cooperative behavior over time are not well understood. Here, we study these questions through social norms influencing mask wearing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Leveraging 2 years of data from the United States (18 time points; n = 915), we tracked mask wearing and perceived injunctive and descriptive mask wearing norms as the pandemic unfolded. Longitudinal trends suggested that norms and behavior were tightly coupled, changing quickly in response to public health recommendations. In addition, longitudinal modeling revealed that descriptive norms caused future increases in mask wearing across multiple waves of data collection. These cross-lagged causal effects of descriptive norms were large, even after controlling for non-social beliefs and demographic variables. Injunctive norms, by contrast, had less frequent and generally weaker causal effects on future mask wearing. During uncertain times, cooperative behavior is more strongly driven by what others are actually doing, rather than what others think ought to be done.
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