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In the period from May to July, the United States repealed statewide and local lockdown measures, reopened society, and became the global leader in reported infections and deaths from the coronavirus COVID-19. During this timeframe, the country saw some of the largest civil rights protests in United States history, and increasing politicization of the pandemic leading up to the Presidential elections. Throughout these events, social distancing recommendations have remained in force. However, social distancing was no longer the focus of the public health response, and was largely overshadowed by face masks – despite evidence of its effectiveness for reducing virus transmission. This study examines to what extent Americans have continued to adhere to social distancing measures across these developments, and which factors sustained adherence. Our findings, based on three waves of nationally representative and cross-sectional studies conducted in May, June, and July, show that adherence to social distancing measures declined from May to July, as did knowledge of these measures, citizens’ practical capacity to adhere to them, and the social norms for adherence. At the same time, opportunities to violate these measures have increased. However, adherence levels stabilized in July, and support for social distancing measures among Americans has remained high throughout. These findings provide important insight into what motivated Americans to adhere to social distancing measures when distancing ceased to be the focus of the public health response. It thereby identifies important directions through which public health policy could sustain or promote adherence to mitigation measures in the United States.

In the month of June, the Netherlands had continued its singular trajectory in combating the COVID-19 pandemic. After the transition from the “intelligent lockdown” into the “1.5 meter society,” the month of June heralded further relaxations of the prior mitigation measures. Building on our previous surveys during the month of May, this paper reports the findings of two additional survey waves collected in June (between 8-11 and between 22-26) among nationally representative samples (N = 1041 and N = 1033). The results show that the processes that sustained compliance during the month of May continued to be influential, especially citizens’ intrinsic motivation to comply, their capacity to do so, their impulse control, and social norms that sustained compliance. Furthermore, there were some indications that extrinsic reasons, such as the likelihood of punishment and the fairness of enforcement, may have become more influential in shaping compliance. A comparison to the findings from May revealed, however, that compliance was gradually declining in the Netherlands, as were the resources that sustain it.

In the month of May, the Netherlands moved out of the “intelligent lockdown”, and into the “1.5 meter society”, which aims to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic by means of safe-distance measures. This paper assesses how Dutch citizens have complied with these social distancing measures. It analyses data from two surveys conducted in May (between 8-14 and between 22-26) among nationally representative samples (N = 984 and N = 1021). We find that a combination of factors explains social distancing compliance. On the one hand we see that people are more likely to comply if they have an intrinsic motivation to do so, when they have the capacity to comply, when they have good impulse control, when they think compliance is normal, and when they see a general duty to obey rules generally. The paper also assesses how compliance has changed over time, assessing changes in May as well as how these are different from compliance with lockdown measures in April. During this period, there has been a gradual decline in compliance that coincides with a decline in intrinsic motivations and capacity for compliance, and there has been an increase in opportunities to violate the measures. The paper assesses what these changes may mean for current and future success of COVID-19 mitigation measures.

Most prior research on the external validity of mixed-motive games has studied only one single game version and/or one specific type of real-life prosocial behavior. The present study employs a different approach. We used multiple game trials — with different payoff structures — to measure participants’ behavior in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the Commons Dilemma, and the Public Goods Dilemma. We then examined the associations between these aggregated game behaviors and a wide set of self-reported prosocial behaviors such as donations, commuting, and environmental behaviors. We also related these prosocial behavior measures to a dispositional measure of prosociality, social value orientation. We report evidence that the weak statistical relationships routinely observed in prior studies are at least partially a consequence of failures to aggregate. More specifically, our results show that aggregation over multiple game trials was especially effective for the Prisoner’s Dilemma, whereas it was somewhat effective for the Public Goods Dilemma. Yet, aggregation on the side of the prosocial behaviors was effective for both these games, as well as for social value orientation. The Commons Dilemma, however, turned out to yield invariably poor relationships with prosocial behavior, regardless of the level of aggregation. Based on these findings, we conclude that the use of multiple instances of game behaviorandprosocial behavior is preferable to the use of only a single measurement.

Nielsen et al. (1) argue that Van Doesum et al. (2) need to consider three points for their interpretation of a positive association between individual-level social mindfulness (SoMi) and environmental performance (EPI) at the country level (3). The association is weaker when 1) it is controlled for GDP and 2) when the data of three countries are removed; also, 3) the data do not address the association between SoMi and individual-level environmental concern. We discuss these points in turn.

Significance Cooperation is key to well-functioning groups and societies. Rather than addressing high-cost cooperation involving giving money or time and effort, we examine social mindfulness—a form of interpersonal benevolence that requires basic perspective-taking and is aimed at leaving choice for others. Do societies differ in social mindfulness, and if so, does it matter? Here, we find not only considerable variation across 31 nations and regions but also an association between social mindfulness and countries’ performance on environmental protection. We conclude that something as small and concrete as interpersonal benevolence can be entwined with current and future issues of global importance., Humans are social animals, but not everyone will be mindful of others to the same extent. Individual differences have been found, but would social mindfulness also be shaped by one’s location in the world? Expecting cross-national differences to exist, we examined if and how social mindfulness differs across countries. At little to no material cost, social mindfulness typically entails small acts of attention or kindness. Even though fairly common, such low-cost cooperation has received little empirical attention. Measuring social mindfulness across 31 samples from industrialized countries and regions (n = 8,354), we found considerable variation. Among selected country-level variables, greater social mindfulness was most strongly associated with countries’ better general performance on environmental protection. Together, our findings contribute to the literature on prosociality by targeting the kind of everyday cooperation that is more focused on communicating benevolence than on providing material benefits.