Behavioral economic methods to inform infectious disease response: Prevention, testing, and vaccination in the COVID-19 pandemic
This article has been Reviewed by the following groups
Listed in
- Evaluated articles (ScreenIT)
Abstract
The role of human behavior to thwart transmission of infectious diseases like COVID-19 is evident. Psychological and behavioral science are key areas to understand decision-making processes underlying engagement in preventive health behaviors. Here we adapt well validated methods from behavioral economic discounting and demand frameworks to evaluate variables (e.g., delay, cost, probability) known to impact health behavior engagement. We examine the contribution of these mechanisms within a broader response class of behaviors reflecting adherence to public health recommendations made during the COVID-19 pandemic. Four crowdsourced samples (total N = 1,366) completed individual experiments probing a response class including social (physical) distancing, facemask wearing, COVID-19 testing, and COVID-19 vaccination. We also measure the extent to which choice architecture manipulations (e.g., framing, opt-in/opt-out) may promote (or discourage) behavior engagement. We find that people are more likely to socially distance when specified activities are framed as high risk, that facemask use during social interaction decreases systematically with greater social relationship, that describing delay until testing (rather than delay until results) increases testing likelihood, and that framing vaccine safety in a positive valence improves vaccine acceptance. These findings collectively emphasize the flexibility of methods from diverse areas of behavioral science for informing public health crisis management.
Article activity feed
-
-
-
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.01.20.21250195: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement IRB: All studies were reviewed and approved by local Institutional Review Boards (University of Kansas or Johns Hopkins University).
Consent: Participants reviewed a study cover letter to provide electronic informed consent prior to participation.Randomization All participants completed these two task manipulations with a randomized order of completion. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Experiment 6 did not …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.01.20.21250195: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement IRB: All studies were reviewed and approved by local Institutional Review Boards (University of Kansas or Johns Hopkins University).
Consent: Participants reviewed a study cover letter to provide electronic informed consent prior to participation.Randomization All participants completed these two task manipulations with a randomized order of completion. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Experiment 6 did not reveal a significant effect of choice framing, which is possibly due to the online setting and limitations of modeling these kinds of opt-in/opt-out procedures. A substantive framing effect for vaccine safety, however, was observed such that intentions were lower under a negative than positive framing. These findings are relevant in that news sources – even when presenting the same data – may focus on either positive (% of scientists approve) or negative (% of scientist disapprove) framings when conveying this information to its readership or viewership [for similar issues in climate change messaging see 52]. The current findings show how such framings could adversely impact the likelihood of obtaining a vaccine and ways in which public health messaging should be optimized to avoid such biases. General Discussion: The COVID-19 pandemic has emphasized how behavioral science is critical to informing public health crisis management. In the current study, we sought to determine how behavioral economic approaches developed from cognitive psychology and operant behavioral psychology traditions can be integrated to address existing and emerging issues in public health – doing so in a rapid and scalable manner. Adapting well validated methods from behavioral economic discounting and demand frameworks, we evaluated behavioral mechanisms contributing to the engagement in preventive health behaviors relevant to infectious disease transmission, namely those associate...
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
-