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Punitiveness toward social distancing deviance in the COVID-19 pandemic: Findings from two national experiments

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Abstract

Objective

This study sought to understand how the public perceived new offenses in a time of public health crisis—social distancing deviance in the COVID-19 pandemic—and what factors influenced their perceptions. We also explored whether the correlates of crisis-related punitiveness changed over time, as the pandemic became more politicized.

Data and methods

Our data came from two national surveys administered one year apart, in March 2020 (n = 995) and March 2021 (n = 1,030). To measure sanction preferences, we used experimental vignettes randomizing the characteristics of the offense (e.g., victim harm) and offender (e.g., individual vs. business owner).

Results

As with other types of deviance, just desert concerns predominated. Respondents preferred harsher penalties when offenders violated social distancing directives (versus guidelines) and caused more harm. Certain political/ideological factors (e.g., binding foundations, libertarianism, racial resentment) became more predictive one year into the pandemic, after controlling for personal fear of the virus and demographic factors.

Conclusions

The findings illustrate how public punitiveness toward antisocial behavior develops over time. When new offenses emerge, the public initially evaluates them mostly based on moral culpability and harm. With politicization, however, other factors (e.g., racial and political beliefs) play a role as well. It appears, then, that public reactions to new offenses initially reflect intuitions of justice and are later updated to incorporate cultural and political concerns.

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Notes

  1. The enforcement of COVID-related policies was inconsistent and variable across jurisdictions (for an overview, see Hunter et al., 2020; White & Fradella, 2020), making it difficult to collect national-level official statistics on law enforcement activities. To put in perspective, however, a total of 28,703 COVID-related enforcement activities were recorded in a single city, San Antonio, between March 2, 2020 and March 9, 2021 (Leal et al., 2023). We also know that many people were arrested in NYC (Bates, 2020). Although these figures cannot be generalized to the USA as a whole, they do indicate substantial enforcement in some locations.

  2. In Robinson and Kurzban (2006), Kendall’s W statistics were 0.95 and 0.88 (strong agreement) for serious offenses and 0.55 and 0.51 (moderate agreement) for less serious or victimless offenses. Therefore, their study still demonstrated impressive agreement about the relative blameworthiness of minor forms of crime.

  3. The premise of Haidt’s (2012) moral foundations theory is that human beings inherit “universal moral taste receptors” through relentless evolutionary process (p. 133), although the sensitivity of those receptors is determined subsequently by social factors experienced during life. Graham et al. (2009, pp. 1030-1031) make this clear, describing moral foundations as “innate psychological mechanisms” that are modifiable. To be specific, Haidt (2012) posits: “Moral matrices vary, but they all must please righteous minds equipped with the same six social receptors” (p. 130). Such an assumption is not incompatible with intuitions of justice, which also focus on the effects of evolution on human psychological dispositions. In other words, both perspectives share the assumption that humans have inherited moral intuitions (psychological dispositions) that increased group survival in their ancestral environments. Indeed, Haidt (2001) characterizes his perspective on morality as an “intuitionist approach.”

  4. Conservatism and libertarianism are often considered under the same ideological umbrella, and they are positively correlated in both Year 1 (r = .437) and Year 2 (r = .477). Following prior literature (Burton et al., 2021), we re-estimated the models using a new composite measure, Rightward Political Ideology, that combined (by averaging) conservatism and libertarianism. The supplementary results revealed significant effects of the composite index (Appendices A, B).

  5. For example, on January 3, 2021, Trump tweeted: “The number of cases and deaths of the China Virus is far exaggerated in the USA because of @CDCgov’s ridiculous method of determination compared to other countries, many of whom report, purposely, very inaccurately and low. ‘When in doubt, call it Covid.’ Fake News!” (Trump, 2021).

  6. According to the 2022 Annual Business Survey, about 21% of the firms in the USA in 2021 were minority-owned; and specifically, only 2.73% were African American-owned (Census Bureau, 2023).

  7. To our knowledge, existing evidence mostly shows that the change in the composition of MTurk workforce during the pandemic was due to an influx of new, more diverse workers (Arechar & Rand, 2021). Accordingly, controlling for sociodemographic characteristics should be sufficient to adjust for this difference in sample composition across years. In addition, studies have found that the generalizability of crowdsource findings documented prior to the pandemic also held during the pandemic (Peyton et al., 2022).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, USA

    Heejin Lee

  2. University at Albany, Albany, USA

    Justin T. Pickett

  3. Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, USA

    Amanda Graham

  4. University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, USA

    Francis T. Cullen

  5. Xavier University, Cincinnati, USA

    Cheryl Lero Jonson

  6. Arizona State University, Phoenix, USA

    Murat Haner

  7. University of South Florida, Tampa, USA

    Melissa M. Sloan

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  1. Heejin Lee
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  2. Justin T. Pickett
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  3. Amanda Graham
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  4. Francis T. Cullen
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  7. Melissa M. Sloan
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Correspondence to Heejin Lee.

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Lee, H., Pickett, J.T., Graham, A. et al. Punitiveness toward social distancing deviance in the COVID-19 pandemic: Findings from two national experiments. J Exp Criminol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11292-024-09610-3

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