The coronavirus outbreak poses a major challenge for our health system. As people become sick and need medical care, they need resources like hospital beds and ventilators. However, if many people become sick in a short period of time, there will not be enough of these resources to care for them all. If we are to treat every sick person with the best possible medical care, we need to both prevent and delay new infections. We know from history and medical science that public behavior is the most important tool for this prevention. But for the public to help, people need to know what to do and how to do it, as well as to understand why these behaviors are so important. People take their cues from those around them in making sense of new, uncertain situations. This makes it important to make sure that everybody is getting good information about the risks of Covid-19 and how to prevent it. Official messages need to reflect scientific knowledge, and myths that pop up in communities need to be addressed so that people can understand and debunk them. The research team has been studying how people are thinking about the risks of Covid-19, and what they are doing to protect themselves and their community. One key finding from that work is that when people are uncertain about the risk, they are more likely to rely on what other people are doing to determine what the right thing to do is. The team also finds that people's main concerns about social distancing are that they are worried about getting by without a paycheck and how they will get food and meet other urgent needs. This project involves surveys and experiments to better understand these concerns and provide new knowledge to help guide policy action. First, we need to know whether helping people understand how to prevent infection will actually lead them to protect themselves. The experiments test and identify how best to help people understand, especially for those who are not fully engaging in social distancing. Then, over the next few months as the situation changes, the research team develops messages to help people understand what is happening and how their behavior can help protect themselves and the people around them.
In early March 2020, the researchers conducted an exploratory survey to determine whether some protective behaviors were reported at low levels and identify predictors of poor compliance. The research showed that compliance with the more extreme social distancing behaviors appear to be dependent on social norms, with rates being lower when other people do not seem to be engaging in such distancing. Furthermore, people appear to rely on those norms particularly when they experience more uncertainty about the risk. The findings also were that concerns about losing pay and disruption of personal plans are most predictive of anticipated failures to comply with orders to stay home, followed by the need to shop for food and other urgent needs. These findings suggest that a policy approach aimed at getting people through financial and logistical hardship is critically important and has the potential to be highly impactful. The new research explores more deeply these concerns and how they relate to protective actions. The first phase establishes which predictive factors have causal influence on protective behaviors. The second phase is an assessment of how well protective behaviors are being performed and identifies causally predictive factors identified in the first phase for a nationally representative sample (oversampling high-risk geographical locations). In the third phase, iteratively for each causal factor, the team develops and pilots messages in a test-bed environment, testing final messages with an experimental design in a national sample (repeating regularly as the environment and pandemic evolve), and following up on a subset of critical messages with a 3-day retest to assess behavior change. Finally, again iteratively for each effective message, the team disseminates recommended messages along with the rationale for why they are useful and how they are understood to work. The team shares its findings with its established network of public health officials.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
