Mask-Wearing Fuels Immoral Behaviour Post-COVID-19

Mask-Wearing Fuels Immoral Behaviour Post-COVID-19

Wai Him Crystal Law, Mahima Tasnim Sarker, Carvajal Vado Andrea Nicole, Kumar Ayush, Brown Haley Zane, Perry Imani Jewel, Ralston Quinn Paul and ^*Chun Yuen Fong

International College of Liberal Arts (iCLA), Yamanashi Gakuin University, 2-3-17 Sakaori, Kofu, Yamanashi 400-0805, Japan

DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.47772/IJRISS.2025.917PSY0055

Received: 15 August 2025; Accepted: 26 August 2025; Published: 29 September 2025

ABSTRACT

In the aftermath of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the continued use of face masks in public spaces has prompted investigation into their broader social and psychological effects. This study examines whether mask-induced anonymity influences moral behaviour in a post-pandemic context. Utilizing a modified Ultimatum/Dictator Game, we compared the behaviour of individuals wearing masks to those not wearing masks under visual and verbal communication conditions. Our results showed that participants wearing masks retained more cash for themselves in conditions where their faces were visible. This indicates that the enhanced visual anonymity provided by masks may promote more self-serving, antinormative and potentially immoral behaviour. These findings contrast with Lu and colleagues (1) who identified masks as moral symbols that reduce deviant behaviour during the pandemic. We propose that the symbolic association of masks has weakened post-pandemic, shifting their impact towards anonymity-related behavioural changes.

Keywords: mask, moral behaviour, anonymity, COVID-19, pandemic

INTRODUCTION

Background

Following the global COVID-19 pandemic, wearing face masks in public spaces has become a widespread practice (2,3). This trend is especially prominent in collectivistic cultures, where perceptions of mask-wearing are generally more positive compared to Western contexts (4,5). Even after formal mask mandates were lifted in many regions, numerous individuals continued to wear masks voluntarily, particularly in countries like Japan (6) and South Korea (7), where mask-wearing remains common in everyday life. A key reason for this continued practice could be the heightened public awareness and perception of COVID-19 risk, prompting individuals to stay cautious even in the absence of official mandates (8). While the medical benefits of mask-wearing—such as reducing virus transmission—have been extensively documented and remain a topic of debate (9,10), our study does not address these aspects. Instead, we focus on the psychological and social implications of prolonged mask use (11,12).

Masks cover a significant portion of the face, including the mouth and nose, thereby obscuring facial expressions and limiting the ability to perceive and interpret emotional cues. This concealment can have substantial psychological impacts, as facial expressions are crucial for nonverbal communication and social interactions (13). By hiding these key areas, masks interfere with the natural flow of emotional information, potentially hindering effective communication and the development of social skills. For instance, reduced exposure to faces were known to affect face processing development in children (14), potentially leading to poorer emotion recognition (15–17) and diminished face recognition skills (18).

Furthermore, evidence has shown that mask-wearing can influence relational development (19) and alter communication dynamics (20–22). While fear of COVID-19 remains a primary reason for continued mask use, studies also indicate that avoidance and impression management significantly contribute to increased mask-wearing behaviours (23–25).

Current study

While previous research has primarily focused on the psychological and developmental impacts of mask-wearing, less attention has been paid to the social dynamics and moral behaviour in daily interactions. An intriguing perspective is offered by Lu and colleagues (1), who suggest that masks function as moral symbols that reduce wearers’ deviant behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic. They argue that the willingness to wear masks demonstrates an individual’s virtue in protecting others, even at the expense of personal convenience. As symbols of moral behaviour, masks may enhance the accessibility of moral concepts and increase moral awareness.

However, Lu et al. (1) also noted that masks act as anonymizers, potentially inhibiting mask wearers’ deviant behaviour by providing a sense of anonymity. This dual role of masks aligns with classic deindividuation theory, which posits that a reduced sense of individual identity and anonymity can lead to increased antinormative immoral behaviour (26–28). With the conclusion of the COVID-19 pandemic and a subsequent reduction in the perceived risk of the virus, the symbolic association between mask-wearing and moral behavior has weakened. Yet, the implications of this shift, particularly regarding the potential increase in perceived anonymity and its impact on moral behavior, remain largely unexplored. Our study seeks to address this research gap by employing a cash distribution experiment based on the Ultimatum/Dictator Game framework. We hypothesize that individuals wearing masks will retain more cash for themselves compared to those not wearing masks, thereby demonstrating the adverse effects of mask-wearing on moral behaviour in the post-COVID era.

METHOD

Participants

Forty-one participants were recruited for the study, with two excluded for extreme responses and disbelief in the experimental setup. The final sample consisted of 39 healthy individuals (mean age = 21.4, SD = 3.05), including 21 females, all with no history of neurological or mental conditions. Participants were undergraduate students of the International College of Liberal Arts of Yamanashi Gakuin University. They were randomly recruited and received decision-based cash compensation (up to 1,000 Japanese yen). Informed consent was obtained from all participants. The study was approved by the Ethics Committee of Yamanashi Gakuin University (reference number: 22-031). Since deception was employed in the behavioural task (see 2.2.2.), a debriefing email was sent to all participants after data collection, explaining the true nature of the experiment.

Materials and Procedures

Mask Manipulation

Upon arriving at the experiment venue, participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: wearing a mask or not wearing a mask. Those in the mask-wearing condition were instructed to put on a disposable mask “to maintain health and safety standards.” All experimenters providing instructions wore masks throughout the study to ensure consistency. Importantly, no participants arrived at the laboratory already wearing a mask, ensuring that mask use was solely determined by the experimental assignment.

Modified Ultimatum/Dictator Game

The Ultimatum Game (29), was originally devised to study bargaining behaviour. The game involves two players—a proposer and a receiver. The proposer must distribute a fixed sum of money between the two, while the receiver can accept or reject this allocation. If the receiver rejects the offer, both players end up with nothing, compelling the proposer to offer a sufficiently fair share to secure the receiver’s acceptance. A variant form, called the Dictator Game (30,31), removes the receiver’s power to reject the allocation, leaving one player—the “dictator”—with complete control over how much money to keep and how much to share. This design is used to measure altruism and moral behaviour; the larger the portion the dictator retains, the lower the perceived level of moral behaviour (32–35).

In our modified version of the Ultimatum/Dictator Game (see Table 1 for the detailed setup and procedures), participants were instructed to act as dictators under five distinct conditions to investigate the modulating effect of mask-wearing on moral behaviour. In each condition, participants were given 200 yen to distribute between themselves and the receiver. When participants arrived at the laboratory, they were seated on one side of a partition, and after settling in, the experimenter would invite a different “receiver” into the room before the start of each condition. Participants were told that each of the five conditions involved a different receiver—allegedly five individuals who had taken part in a previous session as dictators and were now randomly assigned to serve as receivers. In reality, no such prior participants existed. Before the start of this experiment, all dictators were asked whether they would be willing to serve as receivers in a future study, thereby reinforcing the plausibility of this cover story. Additionally, participants were asked if they were aware that there were supposedly five different receivers in the current study after they finished the Dictator game. Those who indicated they were not aware of multiple receivers were removed from the dataset to ensure that only participants who believed the experimental setup were included in the analyses.

In the visual conditions (low anonymity), participants distributed the 200 yen in cash in front of a camera, with the live video purportedly displayed on the other side of the partition, revealing their identity visually. In the verbal conditions (low anonymity), participants verbally read out a line indicating how they would split the 200 yen, making their identity known through voice. For the “Visual-high anonymity” versions, the camera was turned off. For the “Verbal-high anonymity” versions, the participants were informed that the receiver would wear headphones playing loud background noise, thereby obscuring any auditory cues.

Table 1. Overview of the Modified Ultimatum/Dictator Game and Procedure of the 5 Conditions

Note: The order in which participants engaged in the five experimental conditions was randomized across all participants.

The Big-5 and financial stress scales

Participants were also asked to complete the 44-item Big Five Inventory (BFI) (36), based on the five-factor model of personality consisting of Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and (37–40). Each item was rated on a five-point Likert scale, ranging from “strongly disagree” (1) to “strongly agree” (5), producing individual scores for each of the five personality dimensions.

Another scale used in this study was the Financial Stress Scale (41), comprising 24 items that measure overall financial stress. Participants rated each item on a five-point Likert scale, ranging from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 5 (Strongly Agree). The total possible scores span from 24 (indicating low financial stress) to 120 (indicating high financial stress).

Design and analysis

We employed a mixed-design approach, with mask use (mask vs. no-mask) as the between-subject factor and the 5 experimental conditions as the within-subject factor. The dependent variable was the amount of money participants chose to keep for themselves. Additionally, we ran multiple independent-samples t-tests and chi-square tests for demographic comparisons and hypothesis testing. All analyses were performed using JASP (42).

To investigate the effect of mask-wearing across verbal and visual contexts, we calculated difference scores separately for each modality. For visual conditions, we subtracted the amount of cash retained when the camera was off (high anonymity) from when it was on (low anonymity). For verbal conditions, we subtracted the amount of cash retained in conditions where participants were aware of others wearing noise-canceling headphones (high anonymity) from where they were not (low anonymity). This dual approach allowed us to assess the impact of masks as an additional layer of anonymity in both visual and auditory modalities, thereby distinguishing the effects based on the mode of communication.

RESULTS

Sample Demographic

The chi-square test indicated that the mask and no-mask groups did not significantly differ with respect to religious status or gender (see Table 2). Additionally, our multiple independent t-tests showed that there were no significant differences between the mask and no-mask groups in age, financial stress, or any of the Big Five personality dimensions (see Table 3).

Table 2. Percentage of Participants’ Gender and Religious Affiliation Across Mask and No-Mask Conditions

Note: Participants identifying as agnostic or atheist were grouped into the “non-religious” category, while those identifying as Christian, Hindu, Catholic, Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, or any other religious affiliation were grouped into the “religious”.

Table 3. Mean (Standard Error) for Age, Financial Stress, and Big Five Personality Dimensions Across Mask and No-Mask Conditions

Effect of Wearing Mask on Keeping the Cash Across Experimental Conditions

We summarized the effect of mask-wearing on the amount of cash dictators decided to keep across different conditions in Table 3. Our first t-test showed no significant difference between the mask and no-mask groups in baseline condition, indicating that the two groups were fundamentally similar in their cash assignments in the Dictator Game, reflecting comparable altruistic tendencies.

Our independent-samples t-test indicated a significant difference in the Visual condition between the Mask group (M = -6.84, SE = 5.73) and the No-Mask group (M = 10.50, SE = 5.59), t (37) = −2.17, p = .037, Cohen’s d = 0.694 (see Figure 1). This finding suggested that when participants were in front of an active camera (i.e., Low anonymity: with their face being visible), wearing a mask led them to take 6.84 yen more on average than they would when the camera was off (i.e., High anonymity: without their face being visible). Conversely, being in front of an active camera without a mask led participants to take 10.50 yen less on average compared with when the camera was off.

In contrast, no significant difference was found in the Verbal condition, t (37) = -0.32, p = .75 (see Figure 2), with the Mask group (M = -4.21, SE = 8.73) and the No-Mask group (M = 0.50, SE = 11.80), indicating that wearing a mask or not did not significantly impact the amount of cash people kept when the other participant could hear their voice.

Table 3. Effect of Wearing Mask to the Amount of Cash Dictators Decided to Keep across different conditions.

*p < .05

Figure 1. The Difference in Cash Dictators Decided to Keep (Low Anonymity – High Anonymity) Across Mask and No-Mask Conditions

Figure 2. The Difference in Cash Dictators Decided to Keep (Low Anonymity – High Anonymity) Across Mask and No-Mask Conditions

DISCUSSIONS

Since mask mandates were lifted after COVID-19, there has been ongoing debate about whether individuals should continue wearing masks. To investigate the impact of wearing mask on social behaviours, we employed a modified Ultimatum/Dictator Game to assess if individuals wearing masks exhibit more self-serving actions compared to those not wearing masks. Our findings supported this hypothesis, showing that mask wearers retained a larger share of the money for themselves, indicating that enhanced visual anonymity facilitates more antinormative behaviour. These results suggest that mask-wearing may reduce social accountability and increase self-serving tendencies, highlighting significant social and psychological implications of persistent mask use in the post-pandemic era.

Wearing mask enhances antinormative behaviour

Our study revealed that dictators wearing masks retained more cash when their faces were shown compared to when their faces were not shown. This difference was not observed among non-mask wearers. The additional protection of identity provided by masks appears to increase individuals’ willingness to engage in antinormative behaviour. This finding aligns with Deindividuation Theory, which posits that when individuals feel less identifiable, they may engage in more antisocial or norm-violating behaviour (28,43). Supporting this notion, Steinleitner and Lilli (44) found that wearing uniforms can increase aggressive or rule-breaking tendencies due to a reduced sense of personal accountability. Additionally, Suler (45) describes the “online disinhibition effect,” where anonymity leads to more extreme behaviours, potentially paralleling mask-induced anonymity offline. Empirical support for the impact of face coverings on behaviour includes Johnson and Downing (46), who demonstrated that wearing masks hood can increase aggressive or unrestrained behaviour by reducing identifiability. These studies collectively suggest that masks, by enhancing anonymity, may inadvertently facilitate more self-serving and immoral actions in social interactions.

Additionally, our results indicate that the impact of mask-wearing on moral behaviour is context-specific, manifesting only in visual conditions and not in verbal ones. Specifically, the presence of a mask led to increased self-serving behaviour when participants’ faces were visible through an active camera, whereas no such effect was observed when communication was purely verbal. This distinction can be explained by the fact that masks cover a substantial portion of the face, thereby providing stronger identity protection through visual modalities than auditory ones. According to Self-Awareness Theory (47), being identifiable enhances self-focused attention, which in turn promotes adherence to personal and societal moral standards. Conversely, wearing a mask disrupts normal self-monitoring processes by obscuring facial features, thereby reducing self-awareness and lowering moral restraint. This diminished self-awareness allows mask wearers to exploit perceived anonymity, leading to more self-interested and potentially immoral actions.

Our findings contrast with those of Lu et al. (1), who posited that masks serve as moral symbols that reduce deviant behaviour by signaling a commitment to protecting others. They demonstrated that individuals willing to wear masks exhibited higher moral awareness and were less likely to engage in self-serving actions during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, our study, conducted from April to July 2023—over a year after mask mandates were lifted—reveals that mask-wearing is associated with increased immoral behaviour. One possible explanation for this discrepancy is the temporal context of our research. By mid-2023, the symbolic association between masks and moral behaviour may have diminished as masks transitioned from being a public health necessity to a personal or habitual choice. Consequently, the protective moral symbolism identified by Lu et al. (1) may no longer be as influential, allowing the anonymity-enhancing aspects of mask-wearing to prevail.

Limitations and future direction

Although our study provides clear evidence of how mask-wearing may impact moral decision-making through enhanced visual anonymity, it is limited by a relatively small sample size, which may constrain the generalizability of the findings across different contexts. However, we pre-determined our sample size based on previous research investigating social factors in Dictator Game studies, which have utilized similar sample sizes and deemed them sufficient for detecting significant effects (48–51). Specifically, our sample size provided 80% power to detect an effect size of r = 0.328 or greater in an independent-samples t-test with a 5% false-positive rate (α = 0.05).

Additionally, while the study was conducted in an international school with a culturally diverse population, the unique blend of cultural backgrounds may obscure specific cultural influences on mask-wearing behaviour. Previous research (4,5) has demonstrated that perceptions of mask-wearing vary significantly across cultures, suggesting that the symbolic meaning of masks—and consequently their impact on moral behaviour—may differ widely. Future research should undertake cross-cultural investigations to explore how the symbolic significance of masks interacts with cultural norms to affect moral decision-making.

Another limitation is that we did not assess participants’ perceptions of mask-wearing. The experimental setting required some participants to wear masks, and directly inquiring about their perceptions could have inadvertently revealed the study’s aims. This may have led participants to discuss the study with one another, potentially introducing bias into the results. Nonetheless, as highlighted by Lu et al. (1), the moral symbolism of masks plays a crucial role in influencing ethical behaviour, with stronger symbolic associations potentially enhancing positive moral impacts. Therefore, future studies should incorporate additional questions that specifically address the symbolic meanings participants associate with mask-wearing—such as perceptions of responsibility, protection, and social conformity—while ensuring that these questions do not disclose the connection between mask-wearing and the study’s focus on moral behaviour.

Finally, we also did not assess how mask-wearing might influence participants’ emotional status, which could mediate moral decision-making. Again, due to the need to protect the study’s aims and maintain experimental integrity, we avoided directly inquiring about emotional responses related to mask use. However, understanding the emotional impacts of mask-wearing is crucial for elucidating the mechanisms behind its effect on moral behavior (52,53). Future research should incorporate assessments of emotional states to better comprehend how emotions mediate the relationship between mask-induced anonymity and ethical decision-making.

CONCLUSION

Our study demonstrates that mask-wearing in visual contexts can increase self-serving behaviour, highlighting the role of anonymity in moral decision-making post-COVID-19. While masks previously symbolized moral responsibility, their diminished symbolic significance now appears to facilitate more immoral actions by obscuring identity. This underscores the complex social and psychological consequences of prolonged mask use in a post-pandemic society. Consequently, future research should explore these dynamics across diverse social and cultural contexts to fully understand the multifaceted impact of masks on moral behaviour.

Declaration of generative AI and AI-assisted technologies in the writing process

During the preparation of this work, the author(s) used ChatGPT by OpenAI solely for grammar correction. After using this tool, the author(s) reviewed and edited the content as needed and take full responsibility for the content of the publication.

Disclosure of interest              

The authors declare that this study did not receive any funding and that there are no competing interests to disclose.

Data Availability statement

Data associated with this study has been uploaded to ICPSR (Project Code: openicpsr-219222) and is now publicly available.

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