What is it about?
Judging the risk of COVID-19 infection in social settings is difficult, because there are many different factors that matter: how many people will be there, whether it will take place indoors or outdoors, how far apart people will be, and so on. We compare how a nationally representative sample of the public evaluates this risk to how a sample of medical experts do. We find that experts put more emphasis on whether the social setting takes place indoors or outdoors and how long it lasts, compared to the public. Experts also differ in how they combine multiple risk factors in a way that suggests the "whole is greater than the sum of its parts", whereas the public don't engage in this more sophisticated type of risk perception.
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Why is it important?
Our findings provided insight to policymakers during the pandemic to help inform communications, for example by highlighting the benefit of meeting others outdoors rather than indoors. The findings also shed light on an area that has had little previous research - how people judge risk when multiple risk factors need to be combined.
Perspectives
The authors form a small team of psychologists and behavioural economists that conduct research directly for policymakers. This is one of the most sophisticated experiments we ran during the early stages of the pandemic.
Shane Timmons
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Is it riskier to meet 100 people outdoors or 14 people indoors? Comparing public and expert perceptions of COVID-19 risk., Journal of Experimental Psychology Applied, February 2022, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/xap0000399.
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