Economic shock and the erosion of COVID-19 precautionary behavior in Canada during the early pandemic

Maintaining voluntary adherence to public health guidelines during a pandemic is fundamentally a collective action problem. We argue that one challenge is the economic costs these behaviors impose on individuals and society. As their costs are revealed to citizens, adherence declines, in part by changing people’s expectations of the behavior of fellow citizens. We leverage the case of the April 2020 Canadian jobs report and use an Unexpected Event during Survey Design (N ~ 4,910) and an Interrupted Time Series to show that the release of this report corresponded with reduced public health adherence, particularly among young panel respondents, and increased aggregate-level mobility. We also use two survey experiments (N ~ 2,500) on national samples of Canadians to show that information about the economic consequences of public health guidelines reduces expectations of adherence by other citizens and by oneself, especially among young respondents. Further, expectations of adherence by others causes expectations of one’s own adherence in the future. The implication is that we need to develop policies that can facilitate pandemic containment without requiring as much costly voluntary behavior on the part of citizens, particularly when the costs of the crisis, and of adherence, are inequitably distributed through society.