Coping with COVID-19’s Demanding Collective Goals: Can a normative context in favor of Governmental Guidelines Increase Adherence, Increase Personal Well-Being and Reduce Prejudice?

Roxane de la Sablonnière

The COVID-19 crisis has forced the hand of governments globally to adopt demanding measures to prevent the spread of the virus. These demanding measures combined to the impacts of the pandemic have deleterious effects on social cohesion. What can governments do to temper the impacts of the pandemic on social cohesion? We propose that the perceived clarity and coherence of governmental measures as well as the perception of a social norm in favor of these measures create a normative context that shapes social cohesion. Using a representative sample of adults Canadians (N = 1180) and a longitudinal study design, we aim to 1) identify and describe the individual dynamics of the normative context at three time points during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada and 2) determine if the dynamics identified are associated with attitudes and behaviors in favor of the measures, well-being, concerns about minority groups and prejudice toward those who do not adhere to the measures. To capture the dynamics of the normative process, a multigroup trajectory group-based approach (i.e., Latent Class Growth Analysis) was used to identify clusters of individuals perceiving similar levels of normative context and ANOVAs to examine if the identified clusters differ on elements of social cohesion.

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