Kisses, Handshakes, COVID-19 – Will the Pandemic Change Us Forever?

Xenia Matschke and Marc Oliver Rieger

Review of Behavioral Economics, 2021, vol. 8, issue 1, 25-46

Abstract: We study the changes in greeting behavior caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that after the use of handshakes and social kissing as forms of greeting decreased drastically, they became common again already a few months after the outbreak. Nevertheless, a consistently large proportion of respondents (around 57%) plan to change their greeting behavior permanently, either because they simply became used to it or because they want to avoid the danger of contracting and transmitting infectious diseases. As can be seen from the results of the first survey wave in April, 2020, the belief in conspiracy theories about COVID-19 did not influence the greeting behavior of individuals, but it proved to have a strong impact in the second survey wave in September, 2020.

Keywords: COVID-19; SARS-CoV-2; handshakes; social kissing; greetings; behavioral changes; conspiracy theories (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/105.00000132 (application/xml)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:now:jnlrbe:105.00000132

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Review of Behavioral Economics from now publishers
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lucy Wiseman ().