ProPublica has an article that discusses why people engage in risky behaviors during the pandemic. In times of uncertainty, people tend to take their cues from social norms, from what other people around them and whom they know are doing.
When Las Vegas reopened, crowds showed up without masks. An estimated 365,000 people attended the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota. Many didn’t wear helmets or masks. The festivities included a non-socially distanced concert by Smashmouth. And even though masks were distributed and required at a recent Trump campaign rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, some attendees did not wear them, and the campaign packed people into crowded buses.
It may not always seem like it, but people are rational and weigh the costs and benefits when they make decisions, said Eve Wittenberg, a decision scientist at the Center for Health Decision Science at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “People are not stupid here,” she said. But they have no experience thinking through a pandemic and are also getting mixed and conflicted messages from leaders, she said. That creates uncertainty and can lead people to rely on patterns of risk perception that may not be accurate.
…A well-known historical example of people being directed by social norms is smoking, Robinson said. For decades the societal norm said smoking was cool, even after it was known to kill people. That contributed to a lot of people smoking, willing to take the risk. Then the norm flipped and smoking became uncool, and fewer people smoked. “We take a lot of cues from our environment,” Robinson said. “If I see a lot of people wearing a mask, I wear a mask.”
…Wittenberg pointed to the work of Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who coined the term “availability” to describe how we base our thinking on what we’ve seen or experienced. We see it show up when a person assesses his or her risk of a heart attack by recalling instances among acquaintances, the two researchers wrote in their 1974 paper, “Judgment Under Uncertainty.”
The solution to this is for authoritative figures and institutions to present clear and consistent messages to combat the uncertainty. It is here that the US leadership completely failed, choosing instead to exude a false optimism, deny the scale of the pandemic, and even shutting down those who warned of the dangers of inaction. This has led to a state of uncertainty and enabled people to take their cues from what the people around them say and do, leaving them highly susceptible to those with dubious agendas to spread misleading information.
When public health officials did sound an early alarm, their voices were squelched. Dr. Nancy Messonnier, one of the senior leaders at the CDC, warned on Feb. 25 that there would be community spread of the virus, and that protective measures might include school closures and working from home. As ProPublica previously reported, her comments caused the stock market to drop, which infuriated Trump. Vice President Mike Pence was installed as communicator-in-chief, and the CDC officials were sidelined. “When it mattered most, they shut us up,” a senior CDC official told ProPublica.
Even now, the administration has not advanced a clear message. One hopes that that will change with the new Biden administration, where the scientists and the political leaders speak with one voice. Biden saying that he will call for a 100-day period of wearing masks is a good first step. But unfortunately, January 20 seems like an eternity away, especially since the intervening time is expected to see a rapid growth of cases.
“People are not stupid here,” she said.
I do not think that word means what she thinks it does.
Wow, she seems very poorly informed for someone in her profession.
I am not very smart.
She is addressing the issue of most people are required to make decisions without complete knowledge. It’s one of the core philosophical problems of science, which Dr. Singham has addressed in a book and all and stuff.
If you have to make a decision “calling a friend” or “asking the audience” can help you make the decision that will get you the best reward. Since most of us live strongly dependently on other human beings, sometimes the benefit of doing something to go along just to get along is greater than the loss we suffer from doing something that hurts us.
Smart people playing games like Survivor and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire who value “their smartness” over winning will ignore doing these social things every single time, to their detriment. You can watch these shows, and you can watch your RL co-workers, doing the same thing, and they do show intelligence they are intelligent, but they “lose” every single time. I, the dumb person, can see their errors and they look obvious errors how can a smart person do that. I don’t need the idiotic and biased writers of Star Trek jibing the Spock by making him act genuinely idiotically.
This may not suit the commentators here.
All that is left is to discount the future, and sometimes it’s wise to do that.
January 20th seems an eternity and a half away. I remember reading about a study which claimed that overeating was contagious in the same sense that’s used here. The level of derangement we’re currently seeing in the US among conservatives is absolutely mind-boggling.
seachange:
Yeah, but as has been noted, also blithely presuming rationality despite the actual evidence.
And it seems to me it’s more about people wanting to “fit” in, than about actual decision-making.
—
Back in the early 90s, there was a faddish charity thing where for a dollar or a few would get you a less or more garish flower badge, and there was the one day of giving.
Enough people had one that not having one almost became a statement.
Early in the day, one of my co-workers anxiously asked me whether he too should get one, and by later in the day, he bore one too.
Anxiety resolved, for a small monetary cost.
(I too am sensitive to these vibes)
If enough people are irrational around you it is rational to go along, and it doesn’t even have to be a majority, just enough of them so that caution is better.
If all the news treats the things that trumpoids say as if they are news, when they are impossible, shamefully violently gross, or clearly not news, then it is fake news. Trump was correct (gag!) that it’s all Fake News out there, just that perhaps he and his followers thought it was only some of the news. Rational people have no extra information in an environment when news agencies, and magazines like Rolling Stone for instance of what happened here in this blog against a really smart person, print/broadcast any old garbage. Rational people have to generate more effort, perhaps an impossible amount of effort, to determine even basic things.
So I fail to see your point?
seachange:
Not at all.
You not only saw it, you offered what you thought was a rebuttal:
“If enough people are irrational around you it is rational to go along, and it doesn’t even have to be a majority, just enough of them so that caution is better.”
Unfortunately, you left out ceteris paribus from your “it is rational to go along” — because sometimes, it ain’t, without that constraint.
(Problem is that, absent specificity, you make an universal claim instead of an existential one)