Por que Seguimos Regras? Analisando o Exemplo da Prevenção a COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic required the world’s population to quickly learn new behaviors that would help prevent the spread and contamination of the coronavirus. The presentation of rules that described these behaviors and their eff ectiveness was one of the strategies used by governments, scientifi c communities, and the media to produce the required behavioral changes. However, there was resistance on the part of the population to follow these rules. This study sought to describe and analyze the possible eff ects of some variables on the occurrence and maintenance of rule-following that prevented contamination by COVID-19, in the light of scientifi c evidence from the behavioral-analytic literature. The variables were: rule understanding, rule complexity, biological conditions and behavioral repertoire of the listener, environmental conditions, who is the speaker, consequences produced by following the rule, formal properties of rules, confl icting rules, and individual history of the listener. The results indicated that understanding the rule is not a suffi cient condition for following it. The interaction between favorable and unfavorable variables to which a listener is exposed changes the probability of following rules. This study exemplifi es how identifying appropriate ways of presenting rules and making them more probable increases the chance of preserving the lives of the world’s population.Keywords: Rules, rule-following, COVID-19, pandemic, prevention