Changes in risk perception and protective behavior during the first week of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States
By T. Wise, T. Zbozinek, G. Michelini, C. Hagan, Dean Mobbs. 2020
221 citations recorded by the source corpus.
By mid-March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic spread to over 100 countries and all 50 states in the US. Government efforts to minimize the spread of disease emphasized behavioral interventions, including raising awareness of the disease and encouraging protective behaviors such as social distancing and hand washing, and seeking medical attention if experiencing symptoms. However, it is unclear to what extent individuals are aware of the risks associated with the disease, how they are altering their behavior, factors which could influence the spread of the virus to vulnerable populations. We characterized risk perception and engagement in preventative measures in 1591 United States based individuals over the first week of the pandemic (March 11th-16th 2020) and examined the extent to which protective behaviors are predicted by individuals’ perception of risk. Over 5 days, subjects demonstrated growing awareness of the risk posed by the virus, and largely reported engaging in protective behaviors with increasing frequency. However, they underestimated their personal risk of infection relative to the average person in the country. We found that engagement in social distancing and handwashing was most strongly predicted by the perceived likelihood of personally being infected, rather than likelihood of transmission or severity of potential transmitted infections. However, substantial variability emerged among individuals, and using data-driven methods we found a subgroup of subjects who are largely disengaged, unaware, and not practicing protective behaviors. Our results have implications for our understanding of how risk perception and protective behaviors can facilitate early interventions during large-scale pandemics.
Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Economics and Econometrics, Modeling and Simulation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/022e229f84c18ed849f6df70e7d4d659c49cd879
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Citations in the corpus
- Functional Fear Predicts Public Health Compliance in the COVID-19 Pandemic (2020, background): “…while perceiving the virus to be severe has been linked with worse mental health outcomes (Li et al. 2020), feeling personally at risk of infection predicted a greater propensity to engage in hand washing and social distancing behaviors in the early stages of the pandemic (Wise et al. 2020).”
- Risk perceptions of COVID-19 around the world (2020, background): “Lastly, consistent with the literature on the important role of risk perception in motivating health protection behaviors (Floyd, Prentice-Dunn, and Rogers 2000), especially during pandemics (Bish and Michie 2010; Rudisill 2013; van der Weerd et al. 2011; Wise et al. 2020), we find that risk percept”