How COVID is changing the study of human behaviour

How COVID is changing the study of human behaviour
The pandemic is teaching us key lessons about crisis, communication and misinformation, and is spurring changes in the way scientists study public-health questions.

National identity plays a part in how likely people are to support public-health policies such as mask wearing. Credit: Benoit Tessier/Reuters/Alamy

During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jay Van Bavel, a psychologist at New York University, wanted to identify the social factors that best predict a person’s support for public-health measures, such as physical distancing or closing restaurants. He had a handful of collaborators ready to collect survey data. But because the pandemic was going on everywhere, he wondered whether he could scale up the project. So he tried something he’d never done before.

He posted a description of the study on Twitter in April, with an invitation for other researchers to join. “Maybe I’ll get ten more people and some more data points,” he recalls thinking at the time. Instead, the response floored him. More than 200 scientists from 67 countries joined the effort. In the end, the researchers were able to collect data on more than 46,000 people. “It was a massive collaboration,” he says. The team showed how, on the whole, people who reported that national identity was important to them were more likely to support public-health policies1. The work is currently being peer reviewed.

For social scientists, the COVID-19 pandemic has presented a unique opportunity — a natural experiment that “cuts across all cultures and socio-economic groups”, says Andreas Olsson, a psychologist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. Everyone is facing similar threats to their health and livelihoods, “so we can see how people respond differently to this depending on culture, social groups and individual differences”, he says. Researchers have been able to compare people’s behaviours before and after large policy changes, for example, or to study the flow of information and misinformation more easily.

The pandemic’s global scope has brought groups together from around the world as never before. And with so much simultaneous interest, researchers can test ideas and interventions more rapidly than before. It has also forced many social scientists to adapt their methods during a time when in-person interviews and experiments have been next to impossible. Some expect that innovations spurred by the pandemic could outlive the current crisis and might even permanently change the field.

For example, with the technology that’s now tried and tested, Van Bavel says, it’s much easier to build an international team. “Now that we’ve got the infrastructure and experience, we’ll be able to do this for all kinds of things,” he says.

Social vaccine boosters
Before Van Bavel’s massive collaboration, he and a group of more than 40 researchers got together to outline the ways in which behavioural research might inform and improve the response to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus at a time when people are scared, sceptical and inundated by information. They outlined previous research in the field that might influence policy, and identified potential projects on threat perception, decision-making and science communication, among other things2.

Many were eager to apply their work towards understanding the public response to practices such as lockdowns and mask mandates. In the survey of more than 46,000 people, Van Bavel and his colleagues showed that countries in which people were most in favour of precautionary measures tended to be those that fostered a sense of public unity and cohesion. A sense, he says, that “we’re all in this together”. That was somewhat counter-intuitive. Right-wing political ideology correlated with resistance to public-health measures among survey participants, but, on the whole, a strong national identity predicted more support for such measures. Van Bavel says this suggests that it might be possible to leverage national identity when promoting public-health policies.

Other work has shown that who delivers the message really matters. A study3 published in February surveyed more than 12,000 people in 6 countries — Brazil, Italy, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland and the United States — about their willingness to share a message encouraging social distancing. The message could be endorsed by actor Tom Hanks, celebrity Kim Kardashian, a prominent government official from the survey-taker’s country or Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland. Respondents from all countries were most willing to share the message when it came from Fauci (although in the United States, where COVID-19 has been highly politicized, he has become a divisive figure for some). Celebrity endorsements were relatively ineffective by comparison.

Preliminary research suggests that aligning the message with recipients’ values or highlighting social approval can also be influential. Michele Gelfand, a psychologist at the University of Maryland in College Park, is part of a team running an ‘intervention tournament’ to identify ways of promoting mask wearing among conservatives and liberals in the United States.

The researchers are testing eight interventions, or ‘nudges’, that reflect different moral values and factors specific to COVID-19. The aim is to work out which are most effective at encouraging these political groups to adhere to public-health guidance. One message they are testing emphasizes that mask wearing will ‘help us to reopen our economy more quickly’ — an approach designed to appeal to Republicans, who are more likely to view the pandemic as an economic crisis than a health one. Another intervention highlights harm avoidance — a value that liberal people say is important to them. The message emphasizes that a mask ‘will keep you safe’.

“We’re pitting them against one another to see which nudge works best,” Gelfand says. It’s a study design that can test multiple interventions simultaneously, and could be deployed on a large scale across many geographical regions — a benefit made more urgent by the pandemic. The results have not yet been published.

Others started using a similar approach to encourage vaccination even before a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine was available. The Behavior Change For Good Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia was testing nudges that encourage people to get the influenza vaccine. Katherine Milkman, a behavioural researcher at the university’s Wharton School, and her colleagues tested around 20 messaging strategies — everything from jokes to direct appeals. “We’re seeing things that work,” Milkman says. They’ve found, for example, that texting people to say a flu shot had been reserved especially for them boosted vaccination rates4,5.