Predicting the endorsement of preventive behaviors in the context of the Corona virus pandemic: Examining temporal dynamics and the role of risk communication

The current situation of the ongoing new Corona virus pandemic offers a rare chance to investigate the dynamics of the relation between perceived risks for oneself and one's social environment, known health-behavior related factors (i.e., self-efficacy, perceived efficacy of different preventive behaviors, perceived social norms), and the self-reported intention and adoption of protective behaviors over time. We propose two studies to investigate the changes in risk perception, health-behavior related factors, and self-reported preventive behaviors over time in a representative sample of the Swiss population (Study 1) and the role of risk communication for the endorsement of preventive measures (Study 2).As the prevention of a further spreading of the virus crucially depends on measures of "social distancing," we maintain that it is essential to investigate the role of the perceived risk to oneself and others as one of the key predictors of the intention to adopt social distancing behaviors. We hypothesize that younger adults are less likely than older adults to perceive the risk they pose to transmitting the new Corona virus and the resulting potential harm to others. The lower perceived other-related risk, in turn, is hypothesized to lower the likelihood of adopting social distancing behaviors. Based on research demonstrating the effect of risk communication on prosocial behavior (Slovic, 2007), we propose an experiment that compares if different ways to communicate the risk of contracting the Covid-19 virus either to an individual or to a group of people (Study 2) affect particularly younger adults' endorsement of preventive behaviors in general and social distancing in particular, as well as pandemic-related prosocial behavior. Given that the level and importance of determinants are bound to change across the development of the pandemic, we propose Study 1 as an 8 months longitudinal study with a sample representative of the general adult population of Switzerland. Given the urgency to start data collection, the University of Zurich has agreed to fund a first measurement point taking place during the last week of March 2020. As time is key not only for handling the breakout, but also for assessing the changes in determinants of the preventive behaviors, a second measurement point is planned for the first week of May 2020, pending the funding of this second assessment through a grant proposal submitted to the <>. With this proposal, we hope to be able to turn Study 1 into a longitudinal study covering in total a period of 8 months with monthly assessments. Such a longitudinal, multi-measurement, representative study on the dynamic interplay of risk perception, and other evidence-based factors contributing to health behavior, and the currently only available measures to curb the further spread of the pandemic, namely the adoption of preventive behaviors by individuals, has never been conducted before. A unique and novel study like this in combination with experimental data on prosocial behavior during pandemics are of key importance for informing future theory- and evidence-based effective interventions in the case of epidemics or pandemics.