Masking our risky behavior: how licensing and fear reduction reduce social distancing behavior

ABSTRACT

Licensing and fear reduction can explain why people only partially adopt health precautions while still believing that they are remaining compliant with recommendations during the COVID-19 pandemic. We assessed individuals’ attitudes regarding social distancing and personal protective practices, as well as concern about COVID-19 and behaviors in April of 2020. Concern about COVID-19 had dual, competing effects on social distancing behavior. Concern predicted increased social distancing behavior via more positive social distance policy attitudes. However, concern also predicted decreased social distancing behavior via more positive attitudes toward personal protective practices, such as mask wearing. Licensing and/or fear reduction allows individuals to view personal protective practices as substitutable rather than additive measures of safety that should complement social distancing, and this effect is not explained by partisanship or working from home. Policy makers should be cautious when advocating for multiple health precautions of varying effectiveness that are intended to be additive.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• mask-wearing
• moral licensing
• fear
• social distancing
• attitudes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/HW35Q.

Open scholarship

 

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/HW35Q.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Going out in public, hours away from home, and ignoring social distancing served as our dependent variables. While controlling for working outside of the home, there were significant correlations between going out in public and hours away from home (r = .313, p = .000), going out in public and ignoring social distancing (r = .173, p = .000), and hours away from home and ignoring social distancing (r = .143, p = .001). Thus, these three behaviors do correlate with each other, but not so strongly as to suggest that they are redundant and should be combined.

2. We excluded the item “went to work (not at home)” from the going out in public variable because of poor correlations with the rest of the measure, likely because participants had less agency over working from home than changing other, more elective reasons for going out in public.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alexis Griggs

Alexis Griggsis a research technician at University of Michigan and the Ann Arbor VA. Her research interests include neuropsychological testing, psychometrics, and the relationship between stress and traumatic brain injuries.

Jason Weaver

Jason Weaver, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at Colorado College. His research interests include political identity and human sexuality.

Joshua Alvarado

Joshua Alvarado is a Research Assistant at Pew Research Center studying religious identity. He is intent on queering clinical science and conducting community-based research within and for communities of color.