RAPID: Public Responses to Personal and Societal Risk: Attitudes and Behavior on COVID-19 and Global Change

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The project studies public responses to COVID-19 and global change in order to advance the health, prosperity and welfare of American citizens and promote the progress of science. Addressing COVID-19 and global change requires large-scale collective action and governmental response. Yet, for both issues, the consequences of inaction are delayed, the costs and benefits of inaction are unequally distributed, and harms grow exponentially over time, if unattended. These features make it hard to learn from experience and lead to drastic underestimates of the costs of inaction. However, the response of the American public to the two risks appears to be very different. This research project will systematically compare public perceptions and reactions in the United States to these two crises, tracking them over the coming months as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to unfold. Understanding people’s perceptions and responses will highlight promising (and likely different) policy responses to each crisis. A better social scientific understanding of public reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic under conditions of great fear and deep uncertainty is crucial to inform the design of effective and efficient policy interventions and implementation by public and private actors.The project seeks to understand the determinants and consequences of public responses to COVID-19 and global change and will examine both the analytic and affective dimensions of these responses. A large nationally-representative panel survey (n = 4,000) enables the research team to examine how different segments of the public respond to each risk and to test focused hypotheses comparing these responses. The longitudinal dataset will allow the researchers to understand how these responses evolve as the pandemic, and exposure to the pandemic, unfold over time and against a rapidly evolving backdrop of COVID-19 incidence and response. The survey instrument examines several DRMS theories of long-standing importance: (1) Psychological risk dimensions; (2) Decisions from experience and the prediction that personal experience of (extreme) consequences shapes decisions under risk and uncertainty more than mere knowledge of their likelihood; (3) Finite pool of worry and theories of people’s limited ability to attend to or worry about multiple hazards at a time. From a political science perspective, the teams examines how public attitudes and behavior are affected by polarization in the American electorate and by variation in trust in institutions. Collecting panel data on four occasions over the course of the next year tracks changes in Americans’ risk perceptions, trust and distrust in various actors, and in their willingness to engage over this unique, critical, and uncertain time period, when COVID-19 infections and risks will abate and resume in response to differential enforcement and relaxations of lock-down measures across states. Key explanatory variables for the hypotheses include political party affiliation, levels of social trust, trust in science, personal experience, and visceral concern and dread. Novel survey experiments probe support for multilateral action, connection to air pollution, links between attitudes on the pandemic and support for green infrastructure programs, and comparative willingness to pay for government policy action on the two issues.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.