The COVID-19 pandemic and changes in social behavior: Protective face masks reduce deliberate social distancing preferences while leaving automatic avoidance behavior unaffected.

ABSTRACT: Protective face masks were one of the central measures to counteract viral transmission in the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior research indicates that face masks impact various aspects of social cognition, such as emotion recognition and social evaluation. Whether protective masks also influence social avoidance behavior is less clear. Our project assessed direct and indirect measures of social avoidance tendencies towards masked and unmasked faces in two experiments with 311 participants during the first half of 2021. Two interventions were used in half of the participants from each sample (Experiment 1: protective face masks; Experiment 2: a disease prime video) to decrease or increase the salience of the immediate contagion threat. In the direct social avoidance measure, which asked for the de

SUBMITTER: Diekhof EK 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10772029 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature