Public’s Inaccurate Perception of Risk During the COVID-19 Pandemic Led People To Take Inappropriate Actions

Lessons from the pandemic could help deal with other global crises that require collective action, such as climate change.

Superspreading events have proven to be the main form of infection causing the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to inaccurate risk perception. While more than half a million people in the United States have died from COVID-19 in the past year, the public’s perception of infection and mortality remains variable. A study at the start of the pandemic found that local risk perceptions often do not correlate with the national infection rate, leading people to take inappropriate measures. The results are available in the August 16 issue of Decision magazine.

“When the pandemic first started, things seemed abstractly scary, and for many Americans the worst wasn’t in their own backyard,” said Stephen Broomell, an associate professor in the Department of Social and Decision-Making Science at Carnegie Mellon University and first author of the research. “It is difficult to fully understand the risk of something that is not visible, and because many people did not immediately experience the effects of the pandemic, local experiences colored how serious they thought the problem was and even what kind of actions they were prepared to take. were to undertake.”

Broomell has spent his career studying how people grapple with risk on topics beyond their perception, such as tornadoes, climate change and now the pandemic. His research explores why it is so challenging to get groups to make collective decisions to mitigate risk. When the pandemic hit, Broomell and his colleague Patrick Bodilly Kane, a postdoctoral researcher in McGill University’s department of biomedical ethics, applied a cognitive-environmental approach to predict the accuracy of population-level judgment regarding pandemic risk.

“There is not one pandemic debate, but many pandemic debates,” Kane said. “It’s hard for people to link their experience locally to a global phenomenon.”

The team examined the variability of an individual’s experience of risk by modeling a superspreading progression. Local infection rates were used to approximate a person’s geographic local perception of the pandemic. The global risk was determined by the national infection rate, which reflects the severity of the pandemic. They also conducted a national survey consisting of nearly 4,000 survey results obtained between April 24, 2020 and May 11, 2020.

“It’s not that people were completely unaware of the national and international infection rates, but because of the way this particular disease spread within clusters, there was a real chance that a person might not have come across anyone they knew about.” he was infected,” Broomel said. “Every community had an equal chance of experiencing a cluster, but for any given community, especially in the beginning, this chance was low.”

In the study, global trends are a combination of all local trends. If the local trends are unreliable, they will not correlate with the global data. For this reason, the team used reliability to measure the validity of assessments based on local observations of the study results.

They found that early in the pandemic, decision-makers did not consider superdissemination events as a mechanism for infection. While people depended on high-level institutions for information, community-level organizations lacked support to help people understand the risk. Their results showed that provincial-level daily infection rates are a significant predictor of national infection rate assessments, as well as extreme polarization regarding risk perception during the pandemic.

“Understanding this interplay between what people see and how the disease really spreads will help us prepare for similar situations in the future,” Broomell said.

The study is based on a study conducted over 18 days at the start of the pandemic. The researchers do not expect the results of this study to be generalizable to risk perceptions as the pandemic progresses.

“Our work is about COVID-19, but it’s so much more than that,” Kane said. “The thing that causes the disaster affects all of us, but at different times. This dynamic is present in many places where you might not expect it. People can’t see bigger trends because they’re being overtaken by what’s ahead of them.”

According to Broomell, this study is an example of a general framework for predicting how citizens will respond to global risks. A clear understanding of the sources of collective judgment errors can help future generations respond more effectively to global threats.

“We’ve known for a long time that people personally experience climate change in very different ways, which, as with COVID, affects their sense of urgency to take action,” Broomell said. “While psychological responses to global climate change take decades to fully understand, the pandemic played out much faster and showed the world how difficult it can be for people to agree on risks that ultimately affect everyone.”

Reference: “Watching a Pandemic: Global-Local Incompatibility and COVID-19 Superspread Events” Aug 16, 2021, conclusion.
DOI: 10.1037/dec0000155

Broomell and Kane received funding from the National Science Foundation for the project, titled “Perceiving a Pandemic: Global-local Incompatibility and COVID-19 Superspreading Events.”