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The COVID-19 pandemic created enormously difficult decisions for individuals trying to navigate both the risks of the pandemic and the demands of everyday life. Good decision making in such scenarios can have life and death consequences. For this reason, it is important to understand what drives risk assessments during a pandemic, and to investigate the ways that these assessments might deviate from ideal risk assessments. In a preregistered online study of U.S. residents (N = 841) using two blocks of vignettes about potential COVID exposure scenarios, we investigated the effects of moral judgment, importance, and intentionality on COVID infection risk assessments. Results demonstrate that risk judgments are sensitive to factors unrelated to the objective risks of infection. Specifically, activities that are morally justified are perceived as safer while those that might subject people to blame or culpability, are seen as riskier, even when holding objective risk fixed. Similarly, unintentional COVID exposures are judged as safer than intentional COVID exposures. While the effect sizes are small, these findings may have implications for public health and risk communications, particularly if public health officials are themselves subject to these biases.
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The belief that politics drive scientific research & its impact on COVID-19 risk assessment
We use survey data collected from 12,037 US respondents to examine the extent to which the American public believes that political motives drive the manner in which scientific research is conducted and assess the impact that such beliefs have on COVID-19 risk assessments. We find that this is a commonly held belief and that it is negatively associated with risk assessments. Public distrust in scientists could complicate efforts to combat COVID-19, given that risk assessments are strongly associated with one’s propensity to adopt preventative health measures.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2034367
- PAR ID:
- 10249950
- Editor(s):
- Gesser-Edelsburg, Anat
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- PLOS ONE
- Volume:
- 16
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 1932-6203
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- e0249937
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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COVID-19 is a respiratory disease caused by a recently discovered, novel coronavirus, SARS-COV-2. The disease has led to over 81 million confirmed cases of COVID-19, with close to two million deaths. In the current social climate, the risk of COVID-19 infection is driven by individual and public perception of risk and sentiments. A number of factors influences public perception, including an individual’s belief system, prior knowledge about a disease and information about a disease. In this article, we develop a model for COVID-19 using a system of ordinary differential equations following the natural history of the infection. The model uniquely incorporates social behavioral aspects such as quarantine and quarantine violation. The model is further driven by people’s sentiments (positive and negative) which accounts for the influence of disinformation. People’s sentiments were obtained by parsing through and analyzing COVID-19 related tweets from Twitter, a social media platform across six countries. Our results show that our model incorporating public sentiments is able to capture the trend in the trajectory of the epidemic curve of the reported cases. Furthermore, our results show that positive public sentiments reduce disease burden in the community. Our results also show that quarantine violation and early discharge of the infected population amplifies the disease burden on the community. Hence, it is important to account for public sentiment and individual social behavior in epidemic models developed to study diseases like COVID-19.more » « less
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Background: The health belief model suggests that individuals' beliefs affect behaviors associated with health. This study examined whether Ohioans' pre-existing medical health diagnoses affected their belief about personal health risk and their compliance with social distancing during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Prior research examining physical and mental diagnoses and social distancing compliance is nearly nonexistent. We examined whether physical and mental health diagnoses influenced individuals' beliefs that their health is at risk and their adherence with social distancing guidelines. Methods: The study used longitudinal cohort data from the Toledo Adolescent Relationships Study (TARS) (n = 790), which surveyed Ohioans prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Dependent variables included belief that an individual's own health was at risk and social distancing compliance. Independent variables included physical and mental health diagnoses, pandemic-related factors (fear of COVID-19, political beliefs about the pandemic, friends social distance, family social distance, COVID-19 exposure), and sociodemographic variables (age, gender, race/ethnicity, educational level). Results: Individuals who had a pre-existing physical health diagnosis were more likely to believe that their personal health was at risk during the pandemic but were not more likely to comply with social distancing guidelines. In contrast, individuals who had a pre-existing mental health diagnosis were more compliant with social distancing guidelines but were not more likely to believe their personal health was at risk. Individuals who expressed greater fear of COVID-19 believed their health is more at risk than those who expressed lower levels of fear. Conclusion: Health considerations are important to account for in assessments of responses to the pandemic, beliefs about personal health risk, and social distancing behavior. Additional research is needed to understand the divergence in the findings regarding physical health, beliefs about personal health risk, and social distancing compliance. Further, research is needed to understand how mental health issues impact decision-making related to social distancing compliance.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249937
