Our new study, just published in the British Journal of Psychology, shows that people’s adherence to Covid-19 restrictions is more heavily influenced by what their friends and family do than their own principles. Conditional norm following (developed by Biccheri) is robust in the lab, but here we add three things (a) conditional norm following also holds under high personal threat (b) thinking that others follow the rules seems already to work (we don’t know whether people’s beliefs about others were accurate) (c) we also show that social closeness modulates the effect (we only care about whether our fellow citizens follow the rules if we feel closely connected to our country, otherwise we do not care that much)
https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjop.12491
This is also covered in the Daily Mail 🙂 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-9171425/People-likely-follow-Covid-19-restrictions-FRIENDS-study-finds.html#comments
