Why Did People Comply?

October 01, 2023

On Monday 16th of March 2020, when Boris Johnson first proclaimed, “You must stay home,” I very meekly said “OK!” And the chances are that you did too.

Polling from the time shows that self-reported compliance with the stay-at-home orders was high – a finding broadly corroborated by mobility data, which has the marked advantage of not depending on respondents’ honesty about following the law (Ganslmeier et al. 2022; Jackson and Bradford 2021).