The behavioural challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic: indirect measurements and personalized attitude changing treatments (IMPACT).

Shacked Avrashi,Gregory Kroliczak,Sebastian Goerg,Andreas Glöckner,Rabab Fadul,Koral Gutman,Daniel Rubenstein,Tomer Oz,Ilan Fischer

doi:10.1098/rsos.201131

Abstract

Following the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic, governments around the globe coerced their citizens to adhere to preventive health behaviours, aiming to reduce the effective reproduction numbers of the virus. Driven by game theoretic considerations and inspired by the work of US National Research Council's Committee on Food Habits (1943) during WWII, and the post-WWII Yale Communication Research Program, the present research shows how to achieve enhanced adherence to health regulations without coercion. To this aim, we combine three elements: (i) indirect measurements, (ii) personalized interventions, and (iii) attitude changing treatments (IMPACT). We find that a cluster of short interventions, such as elaboration on possible consequences, induction of cognitive dissonance, addressing next of kin and similar others and receiving advice following severity judgements, improves individuals' health-preserving attitudes. We propose extending the use of IMPACT under closure periods and during the resumption of social and economic activities under COVID-19 pandemic, since efficient and lasting adherence should rely on personal attitudes rather than on coercion alone. Finally, we point to the opportunity of international cooperation generated by the pandemic.

Highlights

Glöckner A. 2020 The behavioural challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic: indirect measurements and personalized attitude changing treatments (IMPACT)
Following the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic, governments around the globe coerced their citizens to adhere to preventive health behaviours, aiming to reduce the effective reproduction numbers of the virus
While many studies have addressed the link between persuasion, attitudes and behaviour, we focus here on an assortment of studies that revealed simple and potent effects that can be adjusted to the behavioural challenges imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic

Summary

Descriptions of behavioural effects embedded in the study

Loss aversion is a crucial aspect of prospect theory [26]. It assumes that the utility function, which assigns subjective utilities to objective values, is concave for gains, convex for losses and steeper for losses than gains. To further activate the increased likelihood of advice taking in the case of severe virus outbreaks [31], we primed participants’ severity perceptions, asking them to rate the severity of the pandemic by choosing one of the following rankings: Not good/serious, Extremely serious, Severe, Extremely severe They were told that ‘since the outbreak of the virus is truly dangerous, health authorities have recommended the following guidelines, among others: Do not leave your home and avoid meeting senior citizens; Maintain a distance of at least 2 meters from other people (note that the exact distance was adjusted to the recommendation valid for each country); Make sure to wash hands and maintain strict hygiene’. The full dataset collected for this study is available as an electronic supplementary material, and may be obtained by email from the corresponding author

Initial health attitudes

Findings

Intervention and repetition efficacy