Hostility toward breaching restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic

Ryo Takahashi and Kenta Tanaka

No 2007, Working Papers from Waseda University, Faculty of Political Science and Economics

Abstract: Given the outbreak of Covid-19 most countries have adopted prevention policies that restrict economic and social activities to curb the spread. This has led to increased vigilantism and violence; for instance, Japan reported many cases of stores and firms experiencing harassment for breaching the restrictions during the state of emergency. Accordingly, this study empirically investigates the hostility toward the violation of restriction policy (breaching behavior) by stores in Japan and provides policy suggestions for efficient strategies to reduce the hostility level. We conducted an online randomized experiment of 1,600 individuals in Japan and measured their level of hostility by implementing joy-of-destruction minigames. Our results suggest that participants' average level of hostility toward industries that breach restrictions increased by 29%. However, after providing information on guideline adherence for preventing COVID-19 and sending moral suasion messages, participants significantly reduced their hostility level by 19% and 15%, respectively. Both interventions successfully reduced the probability of the most harmful behavior by approximately 8 percentage points.

Keywords: hostility; online randomized experiment; COVID-19; Japan (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2020-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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