Perceiving a pandemic: Global–local incompatibility and COVID-19 superspreading events.

Abstract

Superspreading events are the primary mode of infection driving the COVID-19 pandemic, but their effect on risk judgments is currently unknown. More than half a million people in the U.S. died from COVID-19 in 1 year, yet public risk perceptions of infection and mortality remain variable. Using a combination of epidemiological models and the psychological theory of global-local incompatibility, we theorize that superspreading diseases create a large variance in infections across geographic localities, leading to highly variable and inaccurate risk perceptions. This is problematic because these local infection rates fail to reveal the overall severity of the pandemic, which determines the personal risk of infection at any location in the near future. We test our predictions with a simulation study and a nationally representative study of U.S. citizens (N = 3,956) conducted in April 2020. Supporting our theory, we find that localized county-level infection rates of COVID-19 are unreliable predictors of national infection rates. However, they explain a significant proportion of variance in judgments of national infection rates, contributing to judgment errors. These results support our theoretical approach for modeling this unique judgment context as an incompatibility between global and local information, providing a framework to predict how citizens will react to novel large-scale (global) risks. Our results also help explain the extreme polarization witnessed in the U.S. regarding perceptions of the risks of the COVID-19 pandemic. Accounting for the variability of local experiences with a pandemic can help future generations prepare for how to respond to similar threats more effectively.

Looking beyond cognition for risky decision making: COVID-19, the environment, and behavior.

“…In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, global-local incompatibility can help explain why, despite more than half a million people in the U.S. dying from COVID-19 in a single year, public risk perceptions of infection and mortality remain variable and highly polarized. Broomell and Kane (2021) identified the superspreading associated with SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes the disease COVID-19) as a large source of variability in this context. Using a combination of epidemiological modeling and global-local incompatibility, Broomell and Kane demonstrate how superspreading diseases create a large variance in infections across geographic localities and how this variance can be linked to judgments to explain highly variable, polarized, and inaccurate risk perceptions.…”

“…When the cues that serve as local representatives fail to accurately reflect their global counterpart, the global risk and the local environment are said to be incompatible (Broomell, 2020b). There are many ways in which local environments can become incompatible with global risks, even when perceptions are based on ecologically valid cues.…”

Urban public health emergencies and the COVID-19 pandemic. Part 1: Social and spatial inequalities in the COVID-city

“…Each instigated a series of urgent responses which connected the local to the global, recognising that microscopic pathogens can potentially spread via the same networks of travel and trade that unite places in world city networks. But despite accumulated knowledge from epidemiology, including that derived from the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak of 2003 – which followed a very similar path of global contagion, both hierarchically through the world city network and locally through spatially contiguous patterns of daily commuting for work or education – COVID-19 spread with an unpredicted rapidity, with ‘super-spreading’ events creating extreme variance in national rates of infection (Broomell and Kane, 2021).…”

‘Communication, that is the key’: a qualitative investigation of how essential workers with COVID-19 responded to public health information

“…This is especially true for groups at a higher risk of infection who are associated with super-spreading events (SSEs) which have a greater influence on the trajectory of epidemics. 4 …”

“…This is especially true for groups at a higher risk of infection who are associated with super-spreading events (SSEs) which have a greater influence on the trajectory of epidemics. 4 Prior research on COVID-19 information has explored the public's perceptions of communication strategies and their ability to correctly answer questions on COVID-19 epidemiology. 5 6 These offer little insight into how people who were most at risk of infection (eg, high risk workers) make sense of information on COVID-19 or how they…”