Generally, we found that our manipulated and measured variables predicted negligence and recklessness decisions, as well as perceptions of the business owner’s responsibility. Exposure also predicted the amount of punitive, but not compensatory damages, awarded in the case. Specifically, if there was a mask mandate in place when the plaintiff became ill with COVID-19, the owner was more likely to be held liable. Further, when the owner’s behavior led to the plaintiff’s COVID-19 exposure, participants were more punitive toward the owner relative to when a customer was responsible for the employee’s COVID-19 exposure. Contrary to expectations, participants did not treat the owner who forgot her mask and the owner who did not require masks differently. Finally, political orientation significantly predicted some of mock jurors’ decisions, such that the more conservative the participant, the less likely they were to view the owner as negligent or reckless. Though these findings generally held across our dependent variables, there were some nuanced findings that are discussed in greater detail below.

Before participants could consider compensatory or punitive damages, they were asked to determine if the owner was negligent and/or reckless and determine the percentage of responsibility that the owner had for her employee’s COVID-19 exposure. Most participants (70%) found the owner to be negligent, and this was particularly true when there was a county mask mandate in place at the time of the plaintiff’s exposure. Similar findings were found for ratings of recklessness and the owner’s percentage of liability. When a mask mandate was in place, participants were more likely to find the owner to be reckless and to attribute a greater percentage of responsibility to the owner.

As previously mentioned, owners have an obligation to provide a workplace for their employees that is “free from serious recognized hazards” (OSHA, 1970). Legally, business owners are obligated to take “reasonable care” to provide a safe workplace, and we hypothesized that failing to follow a county mask mandate might violate the reasonable care standard and lead to increased negligence decisions. That was evident in the present study and suggests that business owners that ignored mask mandates during the pandemic may face unsympathetic jurors in the event they find themselves in such lawsuits.

We also found that participants were more likely to find the owner negligent when the owner’s direct behavior was responsible for her employee’s COVID-19 exposure (as opposed to when an unmasked customer led to the exposure). Though we predicted that an owner who purposefully worked without a mask would be more likely to be found negligent than an owner who accidentally forgot her mask, we did not find any differences in the owner conditions. Thus, the owner’s behavior—regardless of whether she purposefully did not wear a mask or forgot her mask—led to findings of negligence. Again, the same was true for recklessness decisions and owner responsibility. As previously mentioned, a study of lay definitions of negligence found that the important components of negligence were “not taking reasonable care” and “ignoring a dangerous situation” (Nuñez et al., 2014), and intentionality was not found to be a component of lay definitions of recklessness (blinded for review).

Though we predicted that owners who typically follow COVID-19 safety precautions would be held less liable than owners who consistently disregarded COVID-19 precautions, findings indicated otherwise. Whether the person intended a harmful consequence was not an issue. The fact that we did not find any differences in the two owner conditions supports previous findings that intentionality is not a part of lay people’s definition of or decision-making regarding negligence or recklessness (Nuñez et al., 2014). Whether or not the owner typically followed COVID-19 precautions, she did not follow the precautions on the day her employees were exposed. Thus, she did not take reasonable care, and participants were more likely to find her both negligent and reckless. Interestingly, however, intentionality did affect participants’ punitive damage awards in the current study. Given that punitive damages serve to punish the defendant for their conduct, it appears participants increased their punishment when they believed the defendant acted intentionally (i.e., did not require masks in their store). These findings are in line with previous research that suggests intentional actions that lead to harmful outcomes are punished more severely, compared to negligent or accidental actions (e.g., Shultz & Wright, 1985). Future research should further examine the role of intentionality in legal judgments (e.g., recklessness decisions) compared to punishment decisions (e.g., punitive damage awards).

With regard to owner responsibility, both mandates and exposure type impacted perceptions of owner responsibility. Participants thought the owner bore more responsibility when there was a mask mandate in place and the owner was in her store without a mask. Further, ratings of owner responsibility mediated the relationship between our manipulated and measured variables and negligence determinations. As one might expect, when mask mandates were in place or when the owner directly exposed her employees to COVID-19, participants attributed greater responsibility for subsequent illnesses to the owner. This increased responsibility mediated the positive relationship between mask mandates and owner exposure to negligence. The more that participants believed the owner was responsible for the outbreak, the more likely they were to believe the owner was negligent.

As predicted, political orientation affected decisions about the owner’s negligence, recklessness, and responsibility. The more conservative the participant, the less likely they were to find the owner negligent or reckless and ascribed less responsibility to the owner. The question that arises from these findings is whether there is an association between political orientation and decisions in civil cases more generally, or if the political nature of the present case was the primary influence. Regarding political orientation and general civil trial decision making, there is surprisingly little empirical work that examines this issue. However, one unpublished doctoral dissertation (Bensko, 1995) found no effect of political orientation on verdict decisions in a civil case. If true, then the case itself might have yielded decisions that fell among party lines. As previously mentioned, there is ample evidence of a partisan divide over COVID-19 and especially regarding mask mandates (Van Kessel & Quinn, 2020). Survey research has displayed that Conservative Americans are less likely to see COVID-19 as a health threat and are more skeptical of the benefits of masks (Deane et al., 2021). Importantly, although the USA was a prominent example of partisan divides on COVID-19 issues, similar divides were found in other countries. For example, researchers have found that political conservatism was related to COVID-19 skepticism in Canadian samples (Pennycook et al., 2022; Pickup et al., 2020). A Pew Research Center study found that in 17 advanced world economies (e.g., Australia, Germany, Canada, Spain) those on the ideological right were more likely to believe there should be fewer COVID-19 restrictions in their country (Connaughton, 2021).

Our findings suggest a fairly strong effect of political orientation on determinations of negligence, recklessness, and owner responsibility. The more conservative the participant, the less responsibility they ascribed to the owner, which in turn led to fewer liable verdicts. Recall that for every one-point increase in conservative political orientation there was a 36% decrease in the likelihood of finding the defendant negligent. The opposite would be true for every one-point increase in liberal political orientation. Those odds could have a significant impact on a COVID-19 civil case.

Interestingly, although political orientation was a significant predictor of negligence, recklessness, and responsibility perceptions, it was not a significant predictor of either compensatory or punitive damages. Conservative political orientation reduced the likelihood that a participant would find the owner either negligent or reckless, but once a participant decided that an owner acted negligently or recklessly, political orientation no longer played a significant role in subsequent decisions. Instead, the manipulated variable of exposure type was the primary predictors of damages, more specifically of punitive damages.

Regarding compensatory damages, none of our manipulated or measured variables predicted the amount of compensatory damages. This seems reasonable because the plaintiff was asking for a specific amount of money ($72,000) to cover her hospital bills, and the median amount awarded by participants was $72,000. The amount requested provided participants with an exact amount of money to compensate for the hospital bills. The judge’s instructions (see Appendix) included the amount that was being requested and instructed participants that they could award none, some, or all the plaintiff was requesting. Thus, the amount requested served as an anchor for participants, and many used that anchor to make their decisions about the amount of money to award in compensatory damages. Those that awarded less money often awarded exactly ¼, ½ or ¾ of what was requested, again suggesting that the $72,000 served as an anchor for participants in determining compensatory damages.

Punitive damages were more likely to be awarded in this case when participants held that the defendant acted recklessly. With regard to amount of punitive damages, like previous analyses, exposure type was a significant predictor. Our findings were slightly different from what we found in previous analyses, though. Participants awarded an average of $55,697 in the customer exposure conditions, but interestingly, we found a significant difference in the two owner conditions. Participants awarded a greater amount of punitive damages in the case where the owner did not require masks in her store (M = $74,750.02), than when the owner forgot her mask and worked in the store for a few hours (M = $51,631.71). There were no differences between the customer exposure condition and when an owner forgot her mask but continued to work in the store. Thus, punitive damages appear to be more tied to the owner’s willful disregard for safe COVID-19 practices, which is in line with legal and lay definitions of recklessness.

One limitation to the current study is that we used a relatively simple case, and it was only one case in which an owner might have been responsible for employees’ COVID-19 exposure. For example, although the unmasked customer condition yielded the fewest negligence decisions, 45% of the sample held the owner responsible. Perhaps some felt the owner was responsible because she noticed the unmasked customer but did not act because she did not want to lose a sale (i.e., she acted intentionally). If the owner’s intentions were varied (e.g., she did not notice the unmasked customer) there might be fewer people willing to hold her responsible.

In the present study, the plaintiff’s COVID-19 exposure was also relatively straightforward, and contact tracing was able to pinpoint how the plaintiff was exposed to COVID-19. However, the source of COVID-19 exposure for any particular individual is typically not so explicit. To hold an individual liable for negligence, a defendant must be found negligent, and it must be determined that the negligence is the cause of the harm to the plaintiff. Future research should examine how directly owner behavior must be linked to employee harm to find an owner liable. For example, if a customer exposes an owner to COVID-19 and the owner later exposes their employees, is the owner seen to be the direct cause of harm or not? In addition, our study did not explore the plaintiff’s behavior, nor the behavior of other store employees. The results might differ depending on whether the plaintiff and other employees in the store were masked at the time of exposure. The effect of plaintiff behavior could be explored in future work.

Further, given the timing of our data collection we did not examine how vaccination status might also play a role in liability. We collected these data in March of 2021, when vaccines were not widely available. Thus, most people were not vaccinated. Given the fact that vaccines are now widely available, whether businesses require or encourage vaccinations might also be a source of interest. There are data to suggest that views about vaccinations, like the use of masks, are sharply divided among party lines. For example, states with the lowest vaccination rates are states that voted for President Trump in the 2020 election (Ivory et al., 2021; Montanaro, 2021). Further, surveys of American citizens repeatedly show that vaccine hesitancy is greatest among Republican compared to Independent or Democrat voters (Cowan et al., 2021) and that this hesitancy grew over the course of the pandemic (Fridman et al., 2021). Finally, resistance to vaccines is not limited to the USA. In February 2022, Canadian truck drivers shut down key border crossings between Canada and the USA and created gridlock in Ottawa protesting vaccine requirements (Horowitz, 2022). More than 200 people were arrested during those protests, but none of their cases have yet gone to trial (Austen, 2022). Protests against vaccine passports have also been seen throughout Europe (Associated Press, 2022). Thus, political orientation might be an important predictor in civil cases involving vaccines. In addition, given that the link between political orientation and COVID-19 perceptions has been found in other major countries, political orientation might even impact criminal cases such as the cases of the Canadian truck drivers who were arrested during the Ottawa protests. As this is one of the first studies to examine how lack of COVID-19 precautions could lead to decisions about negligence and recklessness, there are many other variables that could be considered in future work.

In the present study, we examined how mask usage and mandates affected perceptions. However, mandates for mask usage have waned in most parts of the world and may be less relevant to views regarding negligence or recklessness going forward. Though masks may no longer be required or necessary in some parts of the world, our work suggests that employers are expected to follow health mandates (whether to use masks, get vaccinated, et cetera). Failing to do so could make business owners liable when their employees are harmed.

Finally, our sample was also less diverse, older, and over-represented by females than what is reported by the US Census (United States Census Bureau, 2020). Nonetheless, given that none of the demographic variables affected our dependent variables of interest, we are confident that our findings would generalize to other samples. Though our MTurk participants were all living in the USA and were jury eligible, they were living in different parts of the country. Typically, jurors for a civil trial are recruited from the same community and may share some experiences that can be relevant to a case outcome. The lack of shared experiences of our participants might be particularly important because COVID-19 practices and experiences varied widely across the country. Some counties and states mandated masks, while others did not. Some states saw high rates of COVID-19 transmission, and some did not. Some states have a greater percentage of liberal voters, while others have a greater percentage of conservative voters. We also did not ask people about their COVID-19 experiences. People who have had a serious COVID-19 illness or who lost a loved one to COVID-19 might have very different perceptions about COVID-19 precautions. Future research should examine how personal experiences and geographical differences (whether within the USA or in other countries) relate to COVID-19 case decisions.

While not without limitations, our findings provide some noteworthy practical implications for both psychology and legal professionals. For instance, clinicians and psychology professionals who regularly interact with clients should be particularly aware of ongoing COVID-19 protocols in their states and local communities. Our results suggest that clinicians should strictly enforce COVID-19 protocols in their workspace given failure to do so will result in increased likelihood of negative outcomes should they find themselves involved in such lawsuits. From a legal professional perspective, civil attorneys in such cases should be concerned with specific factors depending on the focus of the case. When focused on influencing legal determinations of negligence and recklessness, attorneys should pay particular attention to jurors’ political orientation. Alternatively, our results suggest that if attorneys are concerned with damage awards in a particular case, juror political orientation will be of little importance. Rather, attorneys should prioritize argument formation based on perceptions of defendant responsibility and intentionality, given these were important predictors of punitive damage awards.