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，至少30个州和许多县和城市的官方“呆在家里”命令取代了“保持社交距离”的建议。尽管有这些官方命令，人们仍继续在户外和私人场所聚集。他们为什么这样做呢？从某种意义上说，他们是“风险寻求者”吗？他们理解风险，但无论如何还是决定承担风险。还是他们误解了感染这种疾病、患上重病或传播给他人的风险？鉴于公众可获得的有关冠状病毒信息的复杂性和可变性，可能会产生误解。个人可能难以评估自己感染和/或死于该疾病的风险，尤其难以了解将其传染给他人的风险。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各个年龄组之间分布得更为均匀。人们可能会无意识地使用一种简化策略，把注意力集中在更引人注目和被广泛宣传的死亡率上，并认为如果他们更年轻，所有的风险，包括他们对他人构成的风险，都会更小。该项目的第一个目标是评估各年龄组与冠状病毒相关的感知风险，并确定风险感知如何影响人们做出的决定。第二个目标是设计和测试公众能够理解的风险表达。因此，该项目对我们理解人们如何基于复杂的风险信息在上下文中做出风险决策，以及为不同用户量身定制沟通策略的发展做出了重大贡献。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。在冠状病毒的背景下，决策者必须考虑到自己面临的风险，以及如果感染冠状病毒可能感染他人的风险。与这个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评估？他们如何利用这些信息来做出影响自己和他人的预防性决定？该项目进行了一系列在线研究，以确定人们如何单独和组合地看待冠状病毒风险，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，可以理解的风险沟通表达被开发和实验测试，以建立信息表达与风险感知、信任和决策之间的因果关系。最后，通过一些相关的个体差异测量，研究人员确定特定能力是否需要处理复杂的数字风险表达，以及简化表达是否在某些情况下更好。这项工作的结果提供了宝贵的建议，有可能拯救生命。这项研究可以为风险通报的最佳做法提供信息，这对通报未来疫情中的风险具有重要意义。了解如何最好地向公众传达风险，以及是否应针对特定的亚群体进行沟通，对于避免未来的大流行至关重要。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.