Political Party Collective Norms, Perceived Norms, and Mask Wearing Behavior: A Test of the Theory of Normative Social Behavior

ABSTRACT

The theory of normative social behavior (TNSB) postulates that people are influenced by others’ behaviors, which they observe from messages and experience. In addition to focusing on perceived (i.e., descriptive and injunctive) norms, the TNSB was expanded to include collective norms, which represent what people actually do. Testing this expanded theoretical model, the current study examined whether two types of collective norms – collective political norms and collective regional norms – interacted with descriptive norms to influence pandemic mask wearing behavior expectations among U.S. adults (N = 444). The interaction was statistically significant for collective political norms (β = -.74, p = .009) but not collective regional norms (β = -.16, p = .85). Specifically, descriptive norms were related to increased mask wearing expectation for all values of political party collective norms, but the effects were stronger when political party collective norms were low (i.e., low mask wearing behavior was normative). The findings support the inclusion of collective norms in the TNSB, clarify the relationships among different types of norms, and provide insights for norms-based interventions.

Disclosure statement

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

Research involving human participants

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were approved by the University of Utah IRB (IRB_00099938) and were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Notes

1. The larger survey also contained a message experiment unrelated to the current study but had the potential to influence this study’s outcome variable. As we are not assessing the impacts of the experimental conditions, we treated the experimental condition as a covariate in all our analyses.

2. Removing these 11 participants does not change the results. Therefore, we retained them in the analytic sample.

3. The SPSS outputs and Appendices are available on the OSF project page: https://osf.io/zg8nf/?view_only=21a8d8120495423989086337f0f8d815.

Additional information

Funding

This manuscript was written with support from National Institutes of Health (NIH) under award number [1DP2EB022360-01] (PI: J. Jensen), NIH grant under award number [3P30CA042014-29S7] (PI: J. Jensen), and the Immunology, Inflammation, and Infectious Disease Initiative (PIs: J. Jensen & A. J. King).