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

2020年3月11日，冠状病毒正式成为全球大流行。在美国，实行“社交疏远”的建议被来自至少30个州和许多县市的官方“待在家里”命令所取代。尽管有这些官方命令，人们仍继续在户外和私下聚集。他们为什么要这样做呢？他们是不是在“寻求风险”，即他们明白风险，但还是决定去冒险？或者他们误解了感染疾病、患重病或将其传播给他人的风险？鉴于公众可获得的有关冠状病毒的信息的复杂性和多变性，很可能会产生误解。个人可能很难评估自己感染和/或死于这种疾病的风险，特别是很难理解将疾病传染给他人的风险。尽管如此，有一点是明确的：老年人死亡的风险更大。然而，感染这种疾病的风险似乎在不同年龄段之间分布得更均匀。人们可能会使用一种无意识的简化策略，把重点放在更引人注目、更广为人知的死亡率上，并假设如果他们更年轻，所有风险，包括他们给他人带来的风险，都会更小。该项目的第一个目标是评估各年龄组中与冠状病毒相关的感知风险，并确定风险认知如何影响人们的决策。第二个目标是设计和测试公众可以理解的风险表达。因此，这个项目对我们理解人们如何根据复杂的风险信息在背景下做出风险决策以及为不同用户制定沟通策略做出了重大贡献。成功的风险沟通策略取决于首先了解人们如何处理复杂的风险信息。就冠状病毒而言，决策者必须考虑到他们感染冠状病毒对自己以及对他人可能造成的风险。与这一过程相关的许多认知问题目前还没有得到很好的理解。特别是，人们如何理解相关但不同的风险估计？他们如何利用这些信息做出对自己和他人都有影响的预防性决策？该项目进行了一系列在线研究，以确定人们如何单独和结合地感知冠状病毒风险，以及风险认知如何影响他们的预防决策。也许更重要的是，在初步调查的基础上，开发了可理解的风险沟通表达并进行了实验测试，以建立信息表达与风险感知、信任和决策之间的因果联系。最后，使用一些相关的个体差异测量，研究人员确定处理复杂的数字风险表达式是否需要特定的能力，以及简化的表达式在某些情况下是否更好。这项工作的结果提供了宝贵的建议，具有拯救生命的潜力。这项研究可以为风险沟通的最佳做法提供信息，这些做法对未来疫情的风险沟通具有重要影响。了解如何最好地向公众传达风险，以及是否应该针对特定的小组进行沟通，这对于避免未来的混乱至关重要。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.