Getting people to behave in desirable ways (or cease behaving in undesirable ones) is a critical outcome for regulators. While we struggle to save lives and flatten the curve, COVID-19 is providing behavioural and compliance researchers with a natural policy experiment in why people do and don’t do what they’re told, and how this differs...

Discussing a behavioural survey in the UK in early April which assessed why people were or were not complying with Covid-19 lockdown measures, this article argues that effective mitigation relies on intrinsic motivation and people’s individual decisions to comply with social distancing measures.