Scientific Advice and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Revisiting the Asian Disease Problem

Abstract

Abstract The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic has underscored the importance of scientific knowledge and highlighted the challenge for politicians: They had to rely on expert advice and still had to make decisions under uncertainty due to the lack of long-term health data. This article investigates how expert judgments and expert advice affect the choices between programs that are proposed to combat the outbreak of a viral disease by means of a between-subjects design embedded in a survey. We use the classic Asian disease experiment and extend earlier applications by varying the professional background of the experts (virologists vs. social scientists) within the experimental set-up. We use data from a university wide web-survey to show the persistence of framing effects and that the disciplinary background of the expert is not related to individual decision-making under risk.