Compensate at your own risk Heterogeneity in compliance with preventive behaviors through the lens of economic and social preferences

Preventive behaviors are crucial for controlling the spread of infectious diseases. Until now, most of the literature on the understanding of the willingness to comply with preventive behaviors at the individual level has focused on either one of those behaviors or studied several behaviors but independently. However, preventive behaviors might not be independent of each other, and the question of the relationship between these various behaviors deserves to be further investigated. The COVID-19 pandemic represents an interesting setting to study compliance with preventive behaviors when several prophylactic measures aiming to reduce the same infection risk are available. The aim of this study is to investigate how economic and social preferences may shape the relationship between three types of COVID-19 preventive behaviors among a representative sample of the French population: 1) compliance with restrictions on movement, 2) adherence to barrier gestures and 3) COVID-19 testing. Using a Latent Class Analysis, we identify four groups of individuals with diverging patterns of compliance with preventive behaviors, differing both in terms of intensity and types of prophylactic measures followed: individuals who apply all preventive behaviors, those who reject them all, individuals who do not respect restrictions on movement but still protect themselves and others by applying barrier gestures, and those who do not use barrier gestures but comply with restrictions on movement. Our results support the existence of a risk compensation process leading some individuals to tailor their menu of preventive behaviors until they reach the risk threshold they are willing to handle. The composition of the menu of preventive behaviors appears to be linked with individuals' economic and social preferences including risk and time preferences, prosociality, and interpersonal trust. Exploring heterogeneity in preventive behaviors may inform the design of targeted prevention and communication campaigns that are better tailored to achieve public health goals.