Are happier people more compliant? Evidence from lockdowns

What makes people more likely to comply with a lockdown? Christian Krekel (LSE), Sarah Swanke (LSE), Jan-Emmanual De Neve (Oxford University) and Daisy Fancourt (UCL) drew on large-scale surveys and found that happiness predicts compliance, over and beyond a wide range of people’s other observable characteristics. Older and less healthy people seem to be predominantly motivated by risk-avoidance, whereas the motivations of younger ones seem more mixed. People are less likely to follow the rules if they were unhappy.