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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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Calculated Comparisons: Manufacturing Societal Causal Judgments by Implying Different Counterfactual Outcomes
Abstract How do people come to opposite causal judgments about societal problems, such as whether a public health policy reduced COVID‐19 cases? The current research tests an understudied cognitive mechanism in which people may agree about whatactuallyhappened (e.g., that a public health policy was implemented and COVID‐19 cases declined), but can be made to disagree about the counterfactual, or whatwould havehappened otherwise (e.g., whether COVID‐19 cases would have declined naturally without intervention) via comparison cases. Across two preregistered studies (totalN= 480), participants reasoned about the implementation of a public policy that was followed by an immediate decline in novel virus cases. Study 1 shows that people's judgments about the causal impact of the policy could be pushed in opposite directions by emphasizing comparison cases that imply different counterfactual outcomes. Study 2 finds that people recognize they can use such information to influence others. Specifically, in service of persuading others to support or reject a public health policy, people systematically showed comparison cases implying the counterfactual outcome that aligned with their position. These findings were robust across samples of U.S. college students and politically and socioeconomically diverse U.S. adults. Together, these studies suggest that implied counterfactuals are a powerful tool that individuals can use to manufacture others’ causal judgments and warrant further investigation as a mechanism contributing to belief polarization.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2317714
- PAR ID:
- 10538503
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Periodicals LLC
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Cognitive Science
- Volume:
- 48
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 0364-0213
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13408
