Why Do We Follow Rules? Analyzing the Example of COVID-19 Prevention

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic required the world's population to quickly learn new behaviors that would help prevent the spread and contamination of the coronavirus. The presentation of rules that described these behaviors and their effectiveness was one of the strategies used by governments, scientific communities, and the media to produce the required behavioral changes. However, there was resistance on the part of the population to follow these rules. The study sought to describe and analyze the possible effects of some variables on the occurrence and maintenance of rule-following that prevented contamination by COVID-19, in the light of scientific evidence from the behavioral-analytic literature. The variables were: rule understanding, rule complexity, biological conditions and behavioral repertoire of the listener, environmental conditions and who is the speaker, consequences produced by following the rule, formal properties of rules, conflicting rules, and individual history of the listener. The results indicated that understanding the rule is not a sufficient condition for following it. The interaction between favorable and unfavorable variables in following rules to which a listener is exposed changes the probability of the behavior. This study exemplifies how identifying appropriate ways of presenting rules and making them more probable increases the chance of preserving the lives of the world's population.