  The new coronavirus disease (COVID-19) threatens the lives of millions of
people around the world, making it the largest health threat in recent times.
Billions of people around the world are asked to adhere to strict
shelter-in-place rules, finalised to slow down the spread of the virus. Appeals
and messages are being used by leaders and policy-makers to promote pandemic
response. Given the stakes at play, it is thus important for social scientists
to explore which messages are most effective in promoting pandemic response. In
fact, some papers in the last month have explored the effect of several
messages on people's intentions to engage in pandemic response behaviour. In
this paper, we make two contributions. First, we explore the effect of messages
on people's actual engagement, and not on intentions. Specifically, our
dependent variables are the level of understanding of official COVID-19
pandemic response governmental informative panels, measured through
comprehension questions, and the time spent on reading these rules. Second, we
test a novel set of appeals built through the theory of norms. One message
targets the personal norm (what people think is the right thing to do), one
targets the descriptive norm (what people think others are doing), and one
targets the injunctive norm (what people think others approve or disapprove
of). Our experiment is conducted online with a representative (with respect to
gender, age, and location) sample of Italians. Norms are made salient using a
flier. We find that norm-based fliers had no effect on comprehension and on
time spent on the panels. These results suggest that norm-based interventions
through fliers have very little impact on people's reading and understanding of
COVID-19 pandemic response governmental rules.
