Contextualized knowledge reduces misconceived COVID-19 health decisions.

Abstract

How do we resolve conflicting ideas about how to protect our health during a pandemic? Prior knowledge influences our decisions, potentially creating implicit cognitive conflict with new, correct information. COVID-19 provides a natural condition for investigating how an individual's health-specific knowledge (e.g., understanding mask efficacy) and their personal context (e.g., outbreak proximity) influence their protective health behavior endorsement, as information about the virus, its spread, and lethality has changed over time. Using a dual-process-model framework, we investigated the role cognitive conflict has on health decision-making. We used a computer mousetracking paradigm alongside geographical information systems (GIS) as a proxy for context. The results support a contextualized-deficit-model framework in which relevant knowledge and context-based factors help individuals override cognitive conflict to make more preventative health decisions. Findings from this study may provide evidence for a more effective way for experts to combat non-adherence due to conflicting health information.

Scientific and Folk Theories of Viral Transmission: A Comparison of COVID-19 and the Common Cold

“…Why these correlations obtained is not yet clear. Nonetheless, the findings provide further support for the suggestion that interventions to encourage greater adherence to public health recommendations likely will need to target a range of factors that contribute to distrust of scientific evidence (e.g., Chinn et al, 2021;Kubin et al, 2021;Murray et al, 2021), in addition to misconceptions and informational gaps in lay theories (Weisman and Markman, 2017).…”

“…We probed these understandings, and the language used to express them, by means of a rich set of openended questions and "why/how" questions in order to elicit participants' in-depth reasoning and explanations. This provides complementary evidence to methods such as reaction times (Shtulman and Valcarcel, 2012), mouse-tracking (Murray et al, 2021), or neuroimaging (Masson et al, 2014), which focus on rapid, real-time processing of multiple explanatory accounts.…”

Viruses, vaccines, and COVID-19: Explaining and improving risky decision-making.

“…Recent research on COVID-19 confirms the existence of such conflict using sophisticated cognitive tracking procedures (Murray et al, 2021). Predicted relationships among judgments about new information, misinformation, and prior knowledge have been spelled out in mathematical models of FTT (Reyna et al, 2016; see also Reyna, 2012b).…”

“…The main challenge, then, is to communicate accurate information because, as concluded in a recent summary of the implications of social and behavioral science for risk reduction in COVID-19, “Sound health decisions depend on accurate perceptions of the costs and benefits of certain choices for oneself and for society.” (Bavel et al, 2020, p. 461). Initial evidence about COVID-19 supports this role for scientific, numerical, normative, and contextual information about rates of infection in preventative decisions (Broomell et al, 2020; Murray et al, 2021). The questions we take up in subsequent sections are what is missing from this account of health decision-making and whether there are crucial decisions for which this approach is fundamentally at odds with how people actually think.…”

“…Among the most probative evidence for the reality of distinct verbatim and gist representations, and associated processing, is experimental manipulation that uses the same stimuli and participants to show opposite effects under theoretically predicted conditions (e.g., Reyna & Kiernan, 1994, 1995). As Murray et al (2021) have shown, these conflicting cognitive effects apply to COVID-19. For example, suppose a person is given the following information about viral risks: “Seasonal flu kills between 30,000 and 60,000 people annually in the U.S.…”