The World Health Organization has declared the rapid spread of COVID-19 around the world a global public health emergency. It is well-known that the spread of the disease is influenced by people's willingness to adopt preventative public health behaviors, which are often associated with public risk perception. In this study, we present the first assessment of public risk perception of COVID-19 around the world using national samples (total N ¼ 6,991) in ten countries across Europe, America, and Asia. We find that although levels of concern are relatively high, they are highest in the UK compared to all other sampled countries. Pooled across countries, personal experience with the virus, individualistic and prosocial values, hearing about the virus from friends and family, trust in government, science, and medical professionals, personal knowledge of government strategy, and personal and collective efficacy were all significant predictors of risk perception. Although there was substantial variability across cultures, individualistic worldviews, personal experience, prosocial values, and social amplification through friends and family in particular were found to be significant determinants in more than half of the countries examined. Risk perception correlated significantly with reported adoption of preventative health behaviors in all ten countries. Implications for effective risk communication are discussed.

Misinformation about COVID-19 is a major threat to public health. Using five national samples from the UK ( n = 1050 and n = 1150), Ireland ( n = 700), the USA ( n = 700), Spain ( n = 700) and Mexico ( n = 700), we examine predictors of belief in the most common statements about the virus that contain misinformation. We also investigate the prevalence of belief in COVID-19 misinformation across different countries and the role of belief in such misinformation in predicting relevant health behaviours. We find that while public belief in misinformation about COVID-19 is not particularly common, a substantial proportion views this type of misinformation as highly reliable in each country surveyed. In addition, a small group of participants find common factual information about the virus highly unreliable. We also find that increased susceptibility to misinformation negatively affects people's self-reported compliance with public health guidance about COVID-19, as well as people's willingness to get vaccinated against the virus and to recommend the vaccine to vulnerable friends and family. Across all countries surveyed, we find that higher trust in scientists and having higher numeracy skills were associated with lower susceptibility to coronavirus-related misinformation. Taken together, these results demonstrate a clear link between susceptibility to misinformation and both vaccine hesitancy and a reduced likelihood to comply with health guidance measures, and suggest that interventions which aim to improve critical thinking and trust in science may be a promising avenue for future research.

Recent research has challenged the notion that word frequency is the organizing principle underlying lexical access, pointing instead to the number of contexts that a word occurs in (Adelman, Brown, & Quesada, 2006). Counting contexts gives a better quantitative fit to human lexical decision and naming data than counting raw occurrences of words. However, this approach ignores the information redundancy of the contexts in which the word occurs, a factor we refer to as semantic diversity. Using both a corpus-based study and a controlled artificial language experiment, we demonstrate the importance of contextual redundancy in lexical access, suggesting that contextual repetitions in language only increase a word's memory strength if the repetitions are accompanied by a modulation in semantic context. We introduce a cognitive process mechanism to explain the pattern of behaviour by encoding the word's context relative to the information redundancy between the current context and the word's current memory representation. The model gives a better account of identification latency data than models based on either raw frequency or document count, and also produces a better-organized space to simulate semantic similarity.

In this study, we present results from five cross-sectional surveys on public risk perception of COVID-19 and its association with health protective behaviours in the UK over a 10-month period (March 2020 to January 2021). Samples were nationally balanced on age, gender, and ethnicity (total N ¼ 6,281). We find that although risk perception varies between the time points surveyed, it is consistently, significantly, and positively correlated with the reported adoption of protective health behaviours, such as wearing face masks or social distancing. There is also an increase in reported health protective behaviours in the UK between March 2020 and January 2021. The strength of the association between risk perception and behaviour varies by time point, with a stronger relationship in January 2021 compared to March and May 2020. We also assess the stability of the psychological determinants of risk perception over time. People's prosocial tendencies and individualistic worldviews, experience with the virus, trust in government, science, and medical professionals, as well as personal and collective efficacy all emerged as significant predictors. With few exceptions, these predictors remained consistent in their relationship with risk perception over time. Lastly, we find that psychological factors are more predictive of risk perception than an objective measure of situational severity, i.e. the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases at the time of data collection. Implications for risk communication are discussed.

How do people understand the everyday, yet intricate, behaviors that unfold around them? In the present research, we explored this by presenting viewers with self-paced slideshows of everyday activities and recording looking times, subjective segmentation (breakpoints) into action units, and slide-to-slide physical change. A detailed comparison of the joint time courses of these variables showed that looking time and physical change were locally maximal at breakpoints and greater for higher level action units than for lower level units. Even when slideshows were scrambled, breakpoints were regarded longer and were more physically different from ordinary moments, showing that breakpoints are distinct even out of context. Breakpoints are bridges: from one action to another, from one level to another, and from perception to conception.