‘You’re basically just saying to yourself, we’re all going to get it anyway, why bother taking these annoying precautions?’
People vastly overestimate the infectiousness of COVID-19 making them less likely to follow public health guidelines, argues a new paper from British and American economists.
“You have to convey that this is a serious issue and that people should take precautions. However, you don’t want to make people feel fatalistic or hopeless,” said Jesper Akesson, the lead author of the study and the managing director at The Behaviouralist research consultancy in the U.K., in an interview with the National Post. “You want to make people feel like they have self-efficacy and you want to make them feel like what they do matters.
“If you think the virus is very, very infectious, you’re basically just saying to yourself, we’re all going to get it anyway, why bother taking these annoying precautions?” said Akesson. The study, which was conducted at the end of March, also found that people who were fatalist were also less inclined to work from home and to stay away from high risk people. The report illuminates one of the many difficulties in communicating to the public about such a widespread public health issue.
Akesson pointed out that his team’s paper only considers people’s beliefs about the infectiousness of the virus and not, for example, how deadly it is. It’s possible that some of the participants thought the virus was highly transmissible but relatively benign.
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