You are in the virtual meeting of your office and suddenly hear one colleague say that they do not think they would catch the COVID-19 infection. A moment of surprise in your expression reflects your judgement of the colleague’s overconfidence. However, at some point during the enduring months of the pandemic, you notice yourself becoming more confident against the illness. If you are smiling at the resemblance of the above story with your life, this article can help you understand the reason behind this behaviour. Optimism Bias can explain why people are confident in their risk perception of not catching the illness, leading to not taking precautions such as social distancing, wearing masks, and handwashing. With the global prevalence rate at 80%, optimism bias refers to the tendency of people to underestimate the risks of a situation for themselves, even though they may be wary of other people’s risk to it.
The pandemic that started in December 2019 in China, has now spread to the world and has brought forth an unprecedented time where past knowledge has rendered less useful to anticipate the future. It has changed the socio-economic spheres of life including socialising habits and self-conduction in public places. We use our experiences and those of others to guide us through various everyday actions and decisions. Without such adequate memory resources to guide us during the current scenario, decision-making under uncertainty has not made life easier for anyone.
Even though people are aware of the seriousness of Coronavirus, they often fail to take the required preventive measures. A grocery trip to the market is enough to reveal how, despite the news informing the rate of spread, people in India are still roaming with masks hanging loosely around the neck. In the United Kingdom, beachgoers have expressed that they do not perceive much risk being out on a crowded beach. The reason behind this carelessness lies in the fact that it is easy to believe other people’s susceptibility to risk than one’s own, resulting in overconfidence. However, if combined with cooperation and social norms research findings, optimism bias can be used to encourage people to take precautions against the deadly virus, for others and themselves.
Despite the fines being collected by the Indian Police, it is easy to spot a person without a mask or perhaps the mask hanging sideways on one ear until they approach a site with policemen and quickly put on their masks to avoid fines. What can be done to solve this issue and create awareness at the societal and individual levels?
An interesting way to boost prosocial and healthy behaviours is via social norms and cooperation. Presenting only negative information that elicits strong fear might not help because a person’s self-efficacy, belief in one’s own ability to achieve a goal, is important. Feeling helpless in the face of threats can lead to defensiveness, instead of cooperative action, if individuals do not feel they have the capability to do so. A review paper outlining how social and behavioural sciences can be utilized to inform COVID-19 response has explained how information solely focused on undesired public behaviour can backfire by leading people to adhere to such undesired social norms. Counteractively, previous research on social influence and group membership has shown that spreading information about health-promoting actions, adopted by the social or cultural group of the message receivers, can promote the following of desirable social norms. This will provide people a background to base their actions on and motivate them to cooperate as a community. Besides, people tend to behave in a prosocial manner more when there is a highlight upon impact uncertainty and not just outcome uncertainty. Outcome uncertainty refers to questions about whether the other person will be affected by one’s careless action, whereas impact uncertainty focuses on thinking about how much the impact of spread would be, i.e., the extent of suffering. Therefore, making people focus on the uncertainty of impact outcomes can assist them in taking more precautionary measures.
At an individual level, even though mere knowledge of optimism bias might not solve the behavioural issues at hand, learning to recognize the circumstances in which we are likely to make such a mistake can subsequently provide an opportunity to deliberately think rationally upon noticing its occurrence. If you feel emotionally and mentally drained due to the extended pandemic and feel tired upon the thought of making any future-based decisions, understand that it is normal for the brain to get tired when current life and plans get disrupted for a long time, without a clear date for the end. Thus, it is inevitable to use the means you have to relax and refresh your mind and body by spending time with family or flatmates, taking up old hobbies that once provided solace to you, and making out time to meditate and exercise. When the mind is fresh and healthy, people can think better logically.
Behavioural change takes time. In the current scenario when people have to change their personal and social habits quickly, only mass media messages might not be helpful. To foster positive behaviour, government bodies and behavioural design companies are providing nudges by placing footprint stickers for people to stand on and installing barricader divisions to avoid the contact that might occur either due to optimism bias or general carelessness. Together with a shift in news information content, individual-level knowledge of cognitive biases, and behavioural designs, the public outlook towards COVID-19 precautions can change. Stay healthy, stay safe!
Supriya Bisht
