People may be less inclined to follow public health precautions to protect against COVID-19 while in the presence of friends or even just thinking about their friends, according to new research.
on Thursday described how, in five online experiments that posed hypothetical scenarios, individuals perceived less likelihood of infection if it was associated with a friend and purchased fewer protective items such as face masks if they had recently thought about a friend.
In one experiment, 262 participants who had never contracted COVID-19 were given one of three hypothetical scenarios where they had contracted COVID-19 from either a friend, acquaintance or a stranger. They were then asked questions about how much they would spend on health protection, how much of a risk taker they were and how comfortable they felt in social and health-related situations, among others.
Participants who had been infected by a family member or friend believed it was less likely that they would be reinfected than those who had been infected by an acquaintance or a stranger. According to the experiment, participants who had written about a close friend at the start of the study were most commonly associated with purchasing the snack food. Around 27 per cent of those participants chose the snack, while only 21 per cent of the people who wrote about an acquaintance chose the snack.
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