The Impact of Relational Goods on Using Masks during the COVID-19 Pandemic

• In Event: Public Perceptions and Health Communication

Abstract

One of the most common public health measures adopted during the Covid-19 pandemic has been the wearing of facemasks to limit the transmission of the virus and to help to protect wearers from infection. At various times masks have been required in certain settings by government mandates, at other times and places they have been recommended, and at some times and places neither. Compliance with recommendations and even with requirements varied widely across the population. Moreover, the behavior became surprisingly tied to political belief, especially in the negative direction.

We suspect that wearing a mask for health and public health reasons is highly susceptible to relational goods, that is to the expectations of the people one cares about. Relational goods provide an overall conceptual umbrella for incorporating people’s desire for social embeddedness into explanations of behavior. Relational goods are neither public goods nor private goods but can only exist by mutual agreement as part of a relationship with non-arbitrary others. They are operationalized by assessing the degree to which respondents think that people whom they care about consider it important to take specific actions. Prior work has found that relational goods substantially increase the odds that people participate in politics, in activities ranging from voting to protesting and more. This paper investigates whether the same is true for this public health behavior. Are people more likely to wear a mask when they believe that the people they care about think this is important? Are they less likely when the people they care about disapprove? These beliefs tap the strength of relational goods associated with the behavior. We assess whether “relational goods” can account for the differences between people who wore a mask and those who did not.

Understanding the role of relational goods has broader theoretical and practical policy significance. Why people engage in collective action instead of free riding has been a longstanding theoretical puzzle. Relational goods provide an answer to the question of why people contribute to collective action to obtain a public good even when their own behavior has little effect on the probability of the outcome. We have argued that people who value relational goods will engage in collective action. Wearing a mask in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic differs from political participation in that individuals derive a personal benefit from masks by protecting themselves, but the public health consequences of mask-wearing also have the structure of a public good. In addition, there are practical policy implications if the data show that people are more likely to wear a mask if they believe the people they care about think that behavior is important. This suggests a useful lever for increasing compliance not just with this policy, but more generally as well.

The present research asks whether relational goods help to explain the action of wearing a mask and thereby contribute to public health. It uses data from the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS 2020). The 2020 CMPS main samples include approximately 15,000 respondents, with approximately 4000 each Asian American, African American, and Latina/o, and 3000 White, not-Hispanic adults, both citizens and noncitizens. The data were collected between April 2, 2021 and August 25, 2021. The survey items cover the variables identified here as well as many other explanators.

The data includes several questions relevant to wearing masks in 2021. The dependent variable “mask wearing” comes from the following question: “How often when you are inside a public place, like a store, office, or bus, do you wear something over your nose and mouth, like a mask?” Several other questions address factors that may influence wearing a mask. These include opinion as to whether mask mandates were reasonable, the respondent’s vaccination status, and whether the respondent thinks that masks are required locally when inside a public place. Other variables include age, gender, and both party identification and ideology (since mask-wearing was politicized in 2020/2021). The “relational goods” question asked the respondents if “the people you care about, like your friends and family, think doing each activity is important or unimportant, or do they disapprove?” where one of the activities was “Wearing something to cover the nose and mouth, like a mask, when inside a public space, like a store, office or bus.”

The pandemic experience differed across racial and ethnic groups. We thus consider the amount of mask-wearing, the attitudes toward mask-wearing, and the influences on mask-wearing separately for Asian Americans, African Americans, Latino/Latinas, and Non-Latinx whites.

Author

• Carole Jean Uhlaner, University of California, Irvine