Situational Voluntary Compliance: Adherence to COVID-19 Social Distancing Guidelines in the 2020 Local Outbreak in Beijing

To mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic many countries have adopted mandatory social distancing measures, but in China, social distancing was implemented only as an advisory guideline. This article seeks to understand whether, and why Chinese citizens adhered to such social distancing advice. The data, derived from a survey in the 2020 local outbreak in Beijing, show that voluntary compliance was hardly influ-enced by motivational predictors, but was almost exclusively dependent on a single, key situational predictor, namely people’s practical capacity to follow social distancing. These findings demonstrate that the emphasis on intrinsic and extrinsic motivations in existing compliance research does not do justice to the situational nature of voluntary compliance observed within this particular context. We discuss theoretical implications of these findings for the compliance literature. Moreover, we use these findings to provide (tentative) insight into the compliance challenges that China was facing during the course of the pandemic, and to speculate about ways in which compliance may be enhanced during future pandemic outbreaks in China.