Using Social and Behavioural Science to Support COVID-19 Pandemic Response

"Urgent action is needed to mitigate the potentially devastating effects of COVID-19, action that can be supported by the behavioural and social sciences. However, many of the implications outlined here may also be relevant to future pandemics and public health crises."

Editor's note: The work below is the product of multiple authors. Permission has been provided by co-lead author Jay J. Van Bavel, Associate Professor of Psychology & Neural Science at New York University, for this summary. The full list of authors is at the end of this post.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a massive public health campaign to slow the spread of the virus. Members of the global community have been called to take action to formulate effective public health messages, identify cultural and structural factors related to disease spread, sustain prosocial motivations, manage anxiety and loneliness, and motivate compassion for at-risk populations. Written by 42 authors from around the world with relevant expertise, this paper explores how policymakers, the media, and the public can use social and behavioural science to support the COVID-19 pandemic response.

The paper discusses topics that are broadly relevant to numerous stages of the current pandemic; for each area, the authors highlight relevant findings, point to critical gaps in the literature, and discuss insights and implications for policy. Because, as of this writing, there is very little published social science research on the pandemic, the analysis draws on different circumstances (e.g., experience from past outbreaks, laboratory experiments examining hypothetical scenarios) and cites evidence whose quality varies (e.g., correlational studies versus field experiments, single studies versus systematic reviews of substantial evidence). The paper is divided into the following topical sections:

• Threat perception - explores how people are likely to perceive and respond to threats and risk during a pandemic, as well as downstream consequences for decision-making and intergroup relations. Sub-topics: threat; emotion and risk perception; prejudice and discrimination; and disaster and "panic". Sample insight: "News stories that employ the language of 'panic' often create the very phenomena that they purport to condemn. They can foster the very individualism and competitiveness that turns sensible preparations into dysfunctional stockpiling and undermine the sense of collective purpose which facilitates people supporting one another during an emergency."
• Social context - describes how aspects of the social context, such as social norms, social inequality, culture, and polarisation, may help decision-makers identify risk factors and effectively intervene. Sub-topics: social norms; social inequality; culture; and political polarisation. Sample insight (footnote number removed): "Some research suggests that a larger proportion of interventions can come not from direct effects on people who receive the intervention, but from indirect effects on their social contacts who copied the behavior. We may therefore leverage the impact of any behavior change effort by targeting well-connected individuals and making their behavior change visible and salient to others."
• Science communication - examines the challenges associated with different forms of misinformation during a pandemic, as well as strategies for engaging in effective science communication and persuasion around public health. Sub-topics: conspiracy theories; fake news and misinformation; and persuasion. Sample insight (footnote numbers removed): "The fake news game, Bad News, is a real-world inoculation intervention (www.getbadnews.com) used by schools and governments which finds that preemptively exposing people to small doses of misinformation techniques (including scenarios about COVID-19) can reduce susceptibility to fake news and could be embedded directly on social media platforms."
• Aligning individual and collective interests - considers how research on morality and cooperation can encourage prosocial behaviours by individuals and groups. Sub-topics: zero-sum thinking; moral decision-making; and cooperation within groups. Sample insight (footnote numbers removed): "People are...more likely to cooperate when they believe that others are cooperating. Accordingly, interventions based on observability and descriptive norms are highly effective at increasing cooperative behavior in economic games as well as in the field. This suggests that leaders and the media can promote cooperation by making these behaviors more observable."
• Leadership - looks at the role of trust and compliance with leaders, effective identity leadership, and strategies for supporting group members. Sub-topics: trust and compliance; identity leadership; and elevating the ingroup without demeaning others. Sample insight (footnote numbers removed): "Leaders who are seen as prototypical of the group ('one of us') and as acting for the interest of the group as a whole ('working for us'), rather than for themselves or for another group, tend to gain greater influence. Actions which divide the leader from followers, or which suggests that the leader is not prepared to share the burdens of followers, can be corrosive to their ability to shape followers' behaviour."
• Stress and coping - outlines some strategies to mitigate the virus-linked threats to social connection, intimate relationships, and stress. Sub-topics: social isolation and connection; intimate relationships; and healthy mindsets. Sample insight (footnote numbers removed): "Both receiving and giving support online can bolster psychological well-being. However, we caution against enhanced use of passive use of social media as research suggests that it may not contribute to one’s sense of social connection. Instead, technologies that are informationally rich, dyadic, and temporally synchronous appear better suited to generating empathy and connection. Special attention should be placed on helping people who are less familiar with these technologies to learn how to take advantage of digital connections."

Some suggested action points for public health experts, policymakers, community leaders, and the media emerge from the above analysis:

• Encourage a shared sense of identity or purpose by addressing the public in collective terms and by urging "us" to act for the common good.
• Identify sources (e.g., religious or community leaders) that are credible to different audiences to share public health messages.
• Try to promote cooperative behaviour by emphasising that cooperating is the right thing to do and that other people are already cooperating.
• Couple norms of prosocial behaviour with the expectation of social approval and modeled them by ingroup members who are central in social networks.
• Highlight bipartisan support for COVID-related measures, when they exist, as such endorsements in other contexts have reduced polarisation and led to less biased reasoning.
• Disseminate more targeted public health information within marginalised communities, and build partnerships between public health authorities and trusted organisations that are internal to these communities.
• Consider using messages that (i) emphasise benefits to the recipient, (ii) focus on protecting others, (iii) align with the recipient's moral values, (iv) appeal to social consensus or scientific norms, and/or (v) highlight the prospect of social group approval.
• Make people aware that they benefit from others' access to preventative measures.
• Prepare people for misinformation and ensure they have accurate information and counterarguments against false information before they encounter conspiracy theories, fake news, or other forms of misinformation.
• Use the term "physical distancing", as "social distancing" might imply that one needs to cut off meaningful interactions.

Full list of authors, with institutional affiliations: Jay J. Van Bavel, New York University; Katherine Baicker, University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy; Paulo S. Boggio, Mackenzie Presbyterian University; Valerio Capraro, Middlesex University London; Aleksandra Cichocka, University of Kent and Nicolaus Copernicus University; Mina Cikara, Harvard University; Molly J. Crockett, Yale University; Alia J. Crum, Stanford University; Karen M. Douglas, University of Kent; James N. Druckman, Northwestern University; John Drury, University of Sussex; Oeindrila Dube, University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy; Naomi Ellemers, Utrecht University; Eli J. Finkel, Northwestern University; James H. Fowler, University of California, San Diego; Michele Gelfand, University of Maryland; Shihui Han, Peking University; S. Alexander Haslam, University of Queensland; Jolanda Jetten, University of Queensland; Shinobu Kitayama, University of Michigan; Dean Mobbs, California Institute of Technology; Lucy E. Napper, Lehigh University; Dominic J. Packer, Lehigh University; Gordon Pennycook, University of Regina; Ellen Peters, University of Oregon; Richard E. Petty, The Ohio State University; David G. Rand, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Stephen D. Reicher, University of St. Andrews; Simone Schnall, University of Cambridge; Azim Shariff, University of British Columbia; Linda J. Skitka, University of Illinois at Chicago; Sandra Susan Smith, University of California; Cass R. Sunstein, Harvard Law School; Nassim Tabri, Carleton University; Joshua A. Tucker, New York University; Sander van der Linden, University of Cambridge; Paul A. M. Van Lange, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; Kim A. Weeden, Cornell University; Michael J. A. Wohl, Carleton University; Jamil Zaki, Stanford University; Sean Zion, Stanford University; Robb Willer, Stanford University