Is it riskier to meet 100 people outdoors or 14 people indoors? Comparing public and expert perceptions of COVID-19 risk. ESRI Working Paper 689 December 2020.

Timmons, Shane and Belton, Cameron and Robertson, Deirdre and Barjaková, Martina and Lavin, Ciarán and Julienne, Hannah and Lunn, Pete (2020) Is it riskier to meet 100 people outdoors or 14 people indoors? Comparing public and expert perceptions of COVID-19 risk. ESRI Working Paper 689 December 2020. [Working Paper]

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Abstract

How do people perceive and integrate multiple contextual risk factors for COVID-19 infection? We elicited risk perceptions from a nationally representative sample of the public (N = 800) using three psychologically-distinct tasks. Responses were compared to a sample of medical experts who completed the same tasks. The public underestimated the risk associated with environmental factors (such as whether a gathering takes place indoors or outdoors) and the implications when multiple risk factors are present. Our results are consistent with a heuristic simply to ‘avoid people’ and with a coarse (e.g. ‘safe or unsafe’) classification of social settings. A further task, completed only by the general public sample, generated novel evidence that when the risk of infection competes against a risk in another domain (e.g. a different medical risk), people perceive a lower likelihood of contracting the virus. The results have implications for public health communications and psychological theory.

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