Abstract
Emerging zoonoses are a prominent global health threat. Human beliefs are central to drivers of emerging zoonoses, yet little is known about how people make inferences about risk in such scenarios. We present an inductive account of zoonosis risk perception, suggesting that beliefs about the range of animals able to transmit diseases to each other influence how people generalize risks to other animals and health behaviors. Consistent with our account, in Study 1, we find that participants who endorse higher likelihoods of cross-species disease transmission have stronger intentions to report animal bites. In Study 2, using real-world descriptions of Ebola virus from the WHO and CDC, we find that communications conveying a broader range of animals as susceptible to the virus increase intentions to report animal bites and decrease perceived safety of wild game meat. These results suggest that inductive reasoning principles may be harnessed to modulate zoonosis risk perception and combat emerging infectious diseases.
Highlights
Emerging infectious diseases are major economic and public health concerns
For our primary hypotheses about the association between interspecies disease transmission judgments and bite reporting intentions, we found that individual differences in endorsement of bird-to-bird and mammal-to-mammal disease transmission were both positively associated with individual differences in intentions to report mammal bites [Mammal-tomammal: Kendall’s τ = .147, p < .001 (Fig 2B); Bird-to-bird: τ = .140, p < .001; Between birds and mammals: τ = .009]
For example, that both interspecies disease transmission and bite reporting ratings are influenced by a common underlying factor, such as individual differences in beliefs about contagion [29] or risk attitudes [30]
Summary
Emerging infectious diseases are major economic and public health concerns. Drivers of emerging zoonoses include consumption of wild game meat, livestock grazing practices, and adverse contact with animals through bites and handling of carcasses [3, 4]. For all of these drivers, human-animal interaction plays a critical role in disease emergence, and investigating the factors that influence human risk perception is critical to prevention of future pandemics.
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