Field observations and survey evidence to assess predictors of mask wearing across different outdoor activities in an Argentine city during the COVID-19 pandemic

FREIDIN, E.; ACERA MARTINI, L.; SENCI, C.M.; DUARTE, C.; CARBALLO, F.

Mar del Plata

Congreso; XVIII Reunión Nacional y VII Encuentro Internacional de la Asociación Argentina de Ciencias del Comportamiento (AACC); 2021

AACC

IntroductionWearing face masks has become a crucial preventive behavior in the current COVID-19 pandemic. However, research shows that people's compliance with preventive recommendations to reduce the risk of contagion of COVID-19, such as social distancing and mask wearing, varies a lot both within and among countries. We here studied some potential factors underlying variation in compliance with preventive behaviors against COVID-19 by studying mask wearing during outdoor recreational activities in a midsize city of Argentina (Bahía Blanca) in 2020. The originality of present research relies on the complementation of observational (N = 15,507) and survey (N = 578) evidence and in assessing the determinants of and disposition to the same preventive behavior across activities.ObjectivesIn the present studies, we focused on studying demographic as well as belief-related factors associated with COVID-19 preventive behaviors, in particular mask wearing, while people did outdoor recreational activities such as walking, running, and cycling.MethodologyIn Study 1, we did 8 weeks of unobtrusive systematic observation of mask wearing as a function of activity (walking, running, and cycling) in outdoor recreational sites. In Study 2, we ran an online survey (concomitant with the last weeks of the observational study) to measure self-reported mask use and related beliefs, including self- and other-regarding motives to wear masks.ResultsIn Study 1, we find that wearing masks significantly decreased across weeks for the three activities measured. The level of compliance among activities was not homogeneous, however: people walking presented the highest proportion of mask wearing, whereas runners showed the lowest level. In Study 2, survey results showed that, first, reported mask use followed the same pattern across activities as that observed in the field, which provided confidence on the validity of self-reports. Second, self-reported mask wearing was significantly predicted by perceptions of risk of contagion for the self and for others, perceived comfort and health costs of wearing masks, and perceived social norms (personal, descriptive, and prescriptive). Last, neither did perceived illness severity nor perceived mask effectiveness add significant value to predicting mask wearing in the survey data. DiscussionBehavioral observations showed that mask wearing declined over time. Declining compliance with mask wearing was predicted from a social dilemma perspective according to which personally costly prosociality is difficult to sustain without norm enforcement or other mechanism to nudge compliance. Self-reported mask use was predicted by the perceived risk of contagion for the self and for others. This suggests that other-regarding concerns may be a reasonable target to stimulate compliance. Personal costs of mask wearing, in particular comfort costs, resulted a significant negative predictor of mask wearing, which seems as a likely explanation of why runners were the group least disposed to wearing masks. Last, we found that both personal and descriptive norms were the most important predictors of mask wearing. Indeed, conditional cooperation (the propensity to incur prosocial costs as long as I perceive others doing so) may underlie the observed decrease in compliance across weeks found in Study 1.