How to better communicate the exponential growth of infectious diseases.

Martin Schonger,Daniela Sele,Valerio Capraro

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0242839

Martin Schonger, Daniela Sele + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0242839

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Abstract

Exponential growth bias is the phenomenon whereby humans underestimate exponential growth. In the context of infectious diseases, this bias may lead to a failure to understand the magnitude of the benefit of non-pharmaceutical interventions. Communicating the same scenario in different ways (framing) has been found to have a large impact on people’s evaluations and behavior in the contexts of social behavior, risk taking and health care. We find that framing matters for people’s assessment of the benefits of non-pharmaceutical interventions. In two commonly used frames, most subjects in our experiment drastically underestimate the number of cases avoided by adopting non-pharmaceutical interventions. Framing growth in terms of doubling times rather than growth rates reduces the bias. When the scenario is framed in terms of time gained rather than cases avoided, the median subject assesses the benefit of non-pharmaceutical interventions correctly. These findings suggest changes that could be adopted to better communicate the exponential spread of infectious diseases.

Highlights

Non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), such as social distancing, wearing masks, quarantines, school closures or curtailing economic life, can slow down the spread of COVID-19 [1,2,3]
We present subjects with a hypothetical scenario, in which a country can slow the spread of an infectious disease by adopting NPIs
In the commonly used frame of case growth and daily exponential growth rates, subjects in the experiment drastically underestimate the benefit of decreasing the growth rate of an infectious disease

Summary

Introduction

Non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), such as social distancing, wearing masks, quarantines, school closures or curtailing economic life, can slow down the spread of COVID-19 [1,2,3]. A nascent behavioral literature investigates how to improve the adherence to such NPIs, for example regarding social distancing [4,5,6], wearing masks [6,7,8], or self-isolating [5, 6, 9], for an overview see [10]. Absent options such as vaccines or treatments, behavioral adaptations may need to be sustained for many months.

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