The current pandemics of the new type of coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, poses a global challenge. As of writing of this paper, in most countries around the world an exponential growth of cases and deaths is witnessed, with the notable exception of China where the disease started initially (David et al., 2020; Lu et al., 2020) and where it currently seems to be retained. In many countries, first in China, strict counter measures have been implemented, including closing of schools, universities and non-essential businesses as well as restricting individual mobility. In this way, the spread of the virus is supposed to slow down. Social distancing is key here: only if people don't meet with their friends and relatives, spreading can be reduced (Wilder-Smith and Freedman, 2020; Wu and McGoogan, 2020). And this can obviously only work if people comply with that.

Young people, and particularly university students, are particularly mobile and social. Their attitudes toward social distancing therefore plays an important role, especially in free and open societies where the ability to enforcement by state authorities is limited and traditionally obedience toward the state is less emphasized than in Confucian countries and in particular less free countries like China.

In order to measure the attitudes of university students in Germany toward social distancing, we conducted an online survey on March, 24 to March, 25 among 250 subjects, announced through the email information system of our university. While this sample is not representative, it is as close to a representative student sample as is possible given the needed urgency of this research.

We also elicited a number of potentially related factors (knowledge on COVID-19, beliefs in conspiracy theories around the disease, worries about the situation, and demographics), since some of these factors have previously been found to be interrelated:

There are a number of studies related to HIV demonstrating that more knowledge about the disease improves prevention measures among adolescents (DiClemente et al., 1986, 1988). Similar results have also been found in the context of influenza A/H1N1 (Lin et al., 2011), see also (Akan et al., 2010). In the case of COVID-19, the evidence is so far mixed: while (Imtiaz et al., 2020) finds a significant positive effect of education on precautionary behavior, they did not find an effect of better general knowledge about COVID-19. A better understanding of the nature of exponential growth, however, can motivate social distancing, as has been shown in controlled experiments (Lammers et al., 2020; Lunn et al., 2020). We therefore test not only general knowledge, but also particular knowledge about exponential growth in our study.

Conspiracy theories play an important and sometimes devastating effect on prevention measures against diseases. In particular, the case of HIV has been studied in details, see, e.g., Bogart and Thorburn (2005) and the book by Kalichman (2009). Another major concern are vaccination-related conspiracy theories (Jolley and Douglas, 2014), but the issue permeates all kind of health-related topics and influences various behaviors (Oliver and Wood, 2014). In the context of COVID-19, there are already first results on (psychological) factors increasing the receptiveness for conspiracy theories (Swami and Barron, 2020; Uscinski et al., 2020). Moreover, there are indications for a negative effect on the willingness to social distancing (Swami and Barron, 2020).

The problem of conspiracy theories becomes even more pressing as research has shown that it is much easier to prevent a belief in conspiracy theories to form than to undo it (Jolley and Douglas, 2017). We will study how widespread such beliefs are, in the case of COVID-19, and how they affect the willingness to social distancing and the worries about the situation.

The role of worries about COVID-19 has been emphasized in Pakpour and Griffiths (2020). Detailed measurements on factors increasing such worries have been elicited in the MERS outbreak (which was caused by a closely related virus and initially shared certain characteristics with the COVID-19 outbreak) in Ro et al. (2017), where it has been shown that particularly women and people with poor health conditions were worrying the most. We use a different set of items in our survey that allows to extend these results (in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic).

In the following, we describe the main questions of the survey (section Methodology), and present the key findings (section Main Results). Conclusions and practical advice are given in section Conclusions for Health Communication.

We recruited 250 subjects via the email information system of our university to participate in a short online survey that offered the chance to win 50€. The survey took 11 min to complete (median). It also contained a number of other questions not relevant for this paper.

Two hundred and four of our subjects were university students, the others mostly state employees, presumably at the university, although forwarding of the invitation to others was possible. Among the students 66% were female, the median age was 23 years.

In the following, we will only analyze results for the university students, where we removed 22 subjects, since they took a very short time (<5 min) to answer all questions, i.e., they might not have read the questions seriously, leaving a total sample of 182.

Eliciting actual behavior regarding social distancing in a standardized survey poses non-trivial challenges: one might expect a strong observer-expectancy or experimenter effect (Rosenthal, 1976) given that a lack of social distancing might increase the risk of spreading COVID-19 further and thus could be seen as an anti-social act. Following the theory of planned behavior (Ajzen, 1985), behavior (if caused by a conscious plan which is likely the case for most relevant situations) is caused by intention. While measuring intentions would cause similar problems as measuring behavior, its antecedents (attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control), do not suffer as much from these problems. In our study, we focus on attitudes and subjective norms, as they can be measured in our survey avoiding a strong experimenter bias.

We therefore elicited attitudes (together with subjective norms) toward social distancing using a number of brief hypothetical “scenarios” about university students, taking place shortly before the general restrictions on private meetings in Germany were implemented¹.

The scenarios were the following:

They were presented in randomized order. The students could judge each of them on a scale from 1 to 4, corresponding to “totally okay,” “not optimal, but understandable,” “rather bad,” “not acceptable.”

To capture their attitudes toward social distancing, the average of the items 4–5 was subtracted from the average of the items 1–3.

To measure the subject's knowledge on the new coronavirus, a number of statements were given that they should mark as correct or false, namely:

Here the statements 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, and 8 were correct, but 4 and 5 were wrong.

We computed a total score for each participant as sum of the correct choices.

We also asked a question about exponential growth:

Here, exponential growth with a doubling of cases every 4 days (very similar to the rate for SARS-Cov-2 in Germany) leads to a correct answer of about 250,000. We considered an answer below 100,000 as underestimation of exponential growth and defined a dummy variable accordingly.

We measured the tendency to believe into conspiracy theories regarding COVID-19 with the following three items:

In each case we asked for agreement on a four-point Likert scale (4 = agree fully, agree mostly, agree partially, 1 = disagree). A tendency to believe into conspiracy theories was defined as the sum of the scores for these items. While one could argue that a partial agreement to the first statement could be considered as a healthy dosage of doubt about politicians and authorities and not a tendency toward conspiracies, it seems difficult to say the same about the second and third statement. The total sum of these answers therefore seems to be a reasonable measurement instrument for our study.

We also elicited general worries about the corona virus situation, on a five-point Likert scale. Finally, we let subjects estimate the number of deaths that will occur in Germany until end of 2020 due to COVID-19 and the duration the current measures will have to be in place (in weeks).

In this article we have presented results from a current survey on attitudes of German university students regarding social distancing in the context of the ongoing coronavirus crisis. We have focused on empirical results and applications, but more theoretical work on macro- and fundamental issues would be possible as well, but is beyond the scope of this study.

We have seen that the majority of participants strongly supports social distancing measures, but there is a non-negligible number that sees things less clear cut, and some believe in outright conspiracy theories about COVID-19. This, together with some gaps in their knowledge on SARS-CoV-2 and on the expected effects of exponential growth on the further curse of the epidemics is definitely problematic and needs to be addressed in health communication.

Factors that make students have a more positive attitude about social distancing are in particular the number of elderly people they know (as they are known to be at highest risk). Belief in conspiracy theories, however, causes the opposite. This suggests two ways for health communication to increase compliance with social distancing:

(in a follow-up study, we are going to take a closer look at the origins of conspiracy theories in the context of COVID-19 and their effect on precautionary behavior).

Another practical consequence from our study is that we should not worry about confronting people who violate social distancing: even among young people like university students most support such confronting behavior.

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the author, without undue reservation.

Ethical review and approval was not required for the study on human participants in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. Written informed consent for participation was not required for this study in accordance with the national legislation and the institutional requirements.

The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication.

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.