Frontiers: Unmasking Social Compliance Behavior During the Pandemic

We assess different motives underlying mask-wearing behaviors and discuss novel strategies for segmenting customers based on the motives. In 2020, as the novel coronavirus spread globally, face masks were recommended in public settings to protect against and slow down viral transmission. People complied to varying extents, and their reactions may have been driven by a variety of psychological factors. Based on the literature on social influence and on mask-wearing, we define three customer segments: Fully-Compliant customers wear masks, and they seem motivated primarily by concerns about their own health risk. Partially-Compliant customers also wear masks, but with improper and ineffective coverage; our empirical analysis suggests that they are motivated primarily by a desire to comply with social norms. Finally, Unmasked customers do not wear masks. We examine changes in shopping behaviors with the onset of the pandemic to corroborate the conjectured mask-wearing motives. We find that the three groups made significantly different behavior changes: Fully-Compliant customers shopped significantly faster and practiced stricter social distancing with the onset of the pandemic, whereas the other two groups did not adjust their shopping duration or social distancing. History: K. Sudhir served as the senior editor for this article. This paper was accepted through the Marketing Science : Frontiers review process. Funding: Financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grants 71622008 and 71832006] and National Social Science Foundation of China [No. 22VRC174] is gratefully acknowledged. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2022.1419 .