RAPID: Coronavirus Risk Communication: How Age and Communication Format Affect Risk Perception and Behaviors

On March 11, 2020 the coronavirus officially became a global pandemic. In the United States the suggestion to practice ?social distancing? was replaced by official ?stay at home? orders from at least 30 states, and numerous counties and cities. Despite these official orders, people continued to gather in outdoor spaces and in private. Why do they do so? Are they ?risk seeking? in the sense that they understand the risk but have decided to take it anyway? Or do they misunderstand the risk of contracting the disease, becoming seriously ill, or spreading it to others? Given the complexity and variability of the information about coronavirus available to the public, misunderstandings are likely. It may be difficult for individuals to assess their own risk of contracting and/or dying from the disease, and particularly difficult to understand the risk of passing it on to others. Nonetheless, one thing is clear: older people are at a greater risk for fatality. The risk for contracting the disease, however, appears to be more evenly distributed across age groups. It is possible that people use an unconscious simplifying strategy focusing on the more dramatic and widely publicized death rates and assume that if they are younger, all risks, including those that they pose to others, are less. The first goal of this project is to assess the perceived risks associated with coronavirus across age groups and determine how risk perception impacts the decisions people make. The second goal is to design and test risk expressions that are understandable to members of the public. Thus, this project makes significant contributions to our understanding of how people make risky decisions in context, based on complex risk information, as well as to the development of communication strategies tailored for different users.

Successful risk communication strategies depend upon first understanding how people process complex risk information. In the context of the coronavirus, decision makers must take into account both the risk to themselves as well as the risk to others they may infect if they contract the coronavirus. There are numerous cognitive issues associated with this process that at present are not well understood. In particular, how do people understand related but differing risk estimates? How do they use that information to make precautionary decisions that impact themselves as well as others? This project conducts a series of online studies to determine how people perceive coronavirus risks, separately and in combination, as well as how risk perception impacts their precautionary decisions. Perhaps more importantly, based on preliminary surveys, understandable risk communication expressions are developed and tested experimentally to establish causal links between information expression and risk perception, trust, and decisions. Finally, using a few relevant individual difference measures, the researchers determine whether specific abilities are necessary to process complex numeric risk expressions and whether simplified expressions are better in some cases. The results of this work provide invaluable advice with the potential to save lives. This research can inform best practices in risk communication that have important implications for communicating risks in future outbreaks. Understanding how best to communicate risks to the public and whether communication should be tailored to specific subgroups is critical to avoiding future pandemics.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.