Science Skepticism Reduced Compliance with COVID-19 Shelter-in-Place Policies in the United States

Physical distancing reduces transmission risks and slows the spread of COVID-19. Yet compliance with shelter-in-place policies issued by local and regional governments in the United States was uneven and may have been influenced by science skepticism and attitudes towards topics of scientific consensus. Using county-day measures of physical distancing derived from cellphone location data, we demonstrate that the proportion of people who stayed at home after shelter-in-place policies went into effect in March and April 2020 in the United States was significantly lower in counties with a high concentration of science skeptics. These results are robust to controlling for other potential drivers of differential physical distancing, such as political partisanship, income, education and COVID severity. Our findings suggest public health interventions that take local attitudes toward science into account in their messaging may be more effective.

Keywords: COVID-19, physical distancing, belief in science, political partisanship

JEL Classification: I12, I18, H12, H75, D04

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Brzezinski, Adam and Kecht, Valentin and Van Dijcke, David and Wright, Austin L., Science Skepticism Reduced Compliance with COVID-19 Shelter-in-Place Policies in the United States (September 27, 2021). University of Chicago, Becker Friedman Institute for Economics Working Paper No. 2020-56, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3587990 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3587990