The Covid-19 pandemic is an unprecedented opportunity to examine behavioral interventions that increase prosocial behavior during a global health and economic crisis. There are many and varied messages in media, risk communication, and policy recommendations communicated from many sources. How does the public perceive and respond to these messages? When deciding whether to adhere to social distancing and shelter-in-place policies, how do people balance their personal health risks, which might be low, against broader public health risks? This RAPID research examines these questions in the context of the coronavirus. The pandemic is a unique opportunity to test the robustness and relevance of social-behavioral science to improve public response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Specifically, this work examines whether encouraging people to reflect on their personal values about prosocial considerations and good citizenship will encourage them to behave less selfishly. This work will also examine whether encouraging people to think like an unbiased policy analyst will increase their support for social distancing policies when evaluating policy proposals. These questions will be examined over six months of national surveys in the United States. The same questions will be examined across four other countries in two international surveys. These different countries have had varied experiences with the Covid-19 pandemic and with policy responses to the pandemic. Helping the broader public to be less selfish and to think more clearly amidst an unfolding international crisis has tremendous societal value. Implementation and communication of this work will directly impact public adherence to necessary social distancing recommendations and improves civic engagement with policy evaluation.
The unfolding COVID-19 pandemic is unprecedented and provides an urgent opportunity to test the effectiveness of interventions that increase prosocial behavior during a global crisis. We examine whether structured introspection and adopting the perspective of expert policy analysts increases prosocial considerations during the pandemic. Structured introspection is a procedure that identifies relevant attributes such as prosocial considerations and civic values, asking people to report how much those considerations should influence their judgments, decisions, and behaviors. Structured introspection is expected to increase intentions and practicing of social distancing. Expert perspective taking is a procedure in which people are asked to take the perspective of an unbiased expert policy analyst, hypothesized to increase appreciation of health risks associated with COVID-19. Over 6 months, the researchers deploy longitudinal studies with staggered experimental treatments with large, diverse national samples in the United States and cross-sectional interventions in four other nations. Accompanying these experiments, we track media coverage and policy changes among major media outlets in the relevant countries and public health organizations. We test these hypotheses in a naturalistic environment with highly dynamic social-informational ecosystems, demonstrating the robustness of theory and implications beyond the narrow confines of tightly controlled laboratory settings. This RAPID project provides two key theoretical advances. First, it replicates and extends emerging research on structured introspection and expert perspective taking as procedures to reduce weighting bias in judgment and decision making. Second, the project tests these hypotheses in a naturalistic environment in highly dynamic, cross-national social-informational ecosystem. The project demonstrates the robustness of the underlying theory and implications applied during a global crisis.
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.
