Abstract
Disease in U.S. animal livestock industries annually costs over a billion dollars. Adoption and compliance with biosecurity practices is necessary to successfully reduce the risk of disease introduction or spread. Yet, a variety of human behaviors, such as the urge to minimize time costs, may induce non-compliance with biosecurity practices. Utilizing a “serious gaming” approach, we examine how information about infection risk impacts compliance with biosecurity practices. We sought to understand how simulated environments affected compliance behavior with treatments that varied using three factors: (1) the risk of acquiring an infection, (2) the delivery method of the infection risk message (numerical, linguistic and graphical), and (3) the certainty of the infection risk information. Here we show that compliance is influenced by message delivery methodology, with numeric, linguistic, and graphical messages showing increasing efficacy, respectively. Moreover, increased situational uncertainty and increased risk were correlated with increases in compliance behavior. These results provide insight toward developing messages that are more effective and provide tools that will allow managers of livestock facilities and policy makers to nudge behavior toward more disease resilient systems via greater compliance with biosecurity practices.
Highlights
Livestock diseases threaten animal welfare and livelihoods throughout production networks
In Experiment One, when infection risk was set at 5%, and message was delivered with certainty as the Linguistic phrase “Low,” participants chose to use the shower biosecurity practice 38.6% of the time, and 65.8% when the infection risk message was delivered with uncertainty, which marks over a 70% increase in compliance associated with uncertainty aversion
The types of factors that influence the abilities of farm workers to comply with biosecurity protocols like the shower-in-shower-out facilities simulated in these experiments are complex
Summary
Livestock diseases threaten animal welfare and livelihoods throughout production networks. Half of hog facilities have experienced a PEDv outbreak since its introduction [5] with net annual economic welfare reductions initially estimated at between $900 million to $1.8 billion [6]. Many industry experts agree that implementing biosecurity practices is key to reducing the social and economic impacts of livestock diseases to industry stakeholder and consumers of hog products [7, 8], yet investment in biosecurity is low [9,10,11]. Finding innovative and cost-effective ways to motivate, or nudge, farms to implement and comply with biosecurity practices will be instrumental in protecting livestock herds from endemic, exotic, and emerging diseases
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