RAPID: Testing Important Judgment/Decision Making Phenomena in the High-Incentive Context of Covid-19: The Understanding of Physicians and Laypersons

RAPID：测试 Covid-19 高激励背景下的重要判断/决策现象：医生和外行的理解

• 批准号: 2029857
• 负责人: Hal Arkes
• 金额: $ 8.67万
• 依托单位: Ohio State University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2020-06-15 至 2023-05-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2029857&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: RAPID; Testing; Important; Judgment; Decision

The coronavirus pandemic provides a rare opportunity to study public risk perceptions and risk-related behaviors in the midst of a World Health Organization Public Health Emergency of International Concern that could threaten the quality of life of a wide spectrum of Americans. Few emergencies within the United States have affected so many people. The situation is a rich opportunity because it is occurring in real-time and is highly dynamic, involving many players in our country and around the world. As a result, it allows the research team a chance to compare this health threat with other perceived disasters such as immigration, terrorism, and possible future public health emergencies. The public’s perceptions and risk-related behaviors seem likely to change over time in response to media coverage as well as actions from our own and foreign governments. In one longitudinal study, the research team invites participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk to complete one survey each month for 5 months. The researchers query their risk perceptions and affective responses toward the coronavirus, frequency of discussions about the coronavirus with others, behavioral intentions towards hypothetical experimental vaccines and treatments, and support for possible policy solutions such as quarantine. The research also ascertains their intended travel plans and media exposure to the pandemic including how much they trust those sources. The team models the emotional, risk-perception, and behavioral responses of participants toward the coronavirus by using a latent variable growth curve model that examines the trajectories of variables over time. To establish causal links, the scholars also conduct a second related experiment that manipulates affect through narratives and examines its effects on risk perceptions, medical decisions, and policy decisions. Participants are assigned to a more negative or less negative condition, and mediation analysis is used to evaluate the manipulation’s effects. In these studies, theoretical links are made between risk perceptions, social amplification of risk, the affect heuristic and other functions of affect, and numeracy. There is a dynamic test of the three functions of affect by correlating current feelings over time with risk judgments, intended prevention and treatment behaviors, and support for policy options. Theoretical research on affect has not been tested in the setting of a world health emergency. This research results in deep mechanistic understanding of how emotions and media exposure influence vaccine and treatment choices as well as support for policies. Finally, the second study establishes causal links between affect and support for prevention, treatment, and policy strategies. The research tests the dynamic and causal power of the functions of affect and motivated reasoning in order to lay the groundwork for interventions for emotional responses to the coronavirus and future epidemics. The research also has important implications, including for communication methods, for other affect-rich decisions faced by the public and policy makers.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.

冠状病毒大流行提供了一个难得的机会，可以在世界卫生组织国际关注的公共卫生紧急情况下研究公众的风险认知和风险相关行为，这可能威胁到广泛美国人的生活质量。美国国内很少有突发事件影响到如此多的人。这种情况是一个丰富的机会，因为它是实时发生的，而且是高度动态的，涉及我国和世界各地的许多参与者。因此，它使研究小组有机会将这种健康威胁与其他感知到的灾难进行比较，如移民、恐怖主义和未来可能出现的公共卫生突发事件。公众的看法和与风险相关的行为似乎可能会随着时间的推移而改变，以回应媒体的报道以及国内外政府的行动。在一项纵向研究中，研究团队邀请亚马逊机械土耳其的参与者在5个月内每月完成一项调查。研究人员质疑他们对冠状病毒的风险认知和情感反应，与他人讨论冠状病毒的频率，对假设的实验性疫苗和治疗的行为意图，以及对可能的政策解决方案(如隔离)的支持。这项研究还确定了他们计划的旅行计划和媒体对大流行的暴露，包括他们对这些消息来源的信任程度。该团队通过使用潜在变量增长曲线模型来模拟参与者对冠状病毒的情绪、风险感知和行为反应，该模型检查了变量随时间的轨迹。为了建立因果联系，学者们还进行了第二个相关实验，通过叙事操纵情感，并检查其对风险感知、医疗决策和政策决策的影响。参与者被分配到更消极或更不消极的条件下，并使用中介分析来评估操纵的效果。在这些研究中，风险感知、风险的社会放大、情感启发式和情感的其他功能以及算术之间建立了理论联系。通过将当前感觉随时间推移与风险判断、预期的预防和治疗行为以及对政策选择的支持相关联，对影响的三个功能进行了动态测试。关于情感的理论研究还没有在世界卫生紧急情况下得到检验。这项研究对情绪和媒体曝光如何影响疫苗和治疗选择以及对政策的支持产生了深刻的机械性理解。最后，第二项研究建立了情感和对预防、治疗和政策策略的支持之间的因果联系。这项研究测试了情感和动机推理功能的动态和因果能力，以便为干预对冠状病毒和未来流行病的情绪反应奠定基础。这项研究也具有重要的意义，包括对沟通方法的影响，以及公众和政策制定者面临的其他影响丰富的决定。这一奖项反映了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。