About: Sustained non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) can contain the spread of infectious disease when vaccines or treatments are not available. The benefit of such behavioural adaptations can be modelled as the deceleration of the exponential growth of cases. Humans underestimate exponential growth, as has been documented in biological, environmental and financial contexts. Hence, they might also underestimate the benefit of reducing the exponential growth rate. Different ways of communicating the same scenario, i.e. frames, have been found to have a large impact on people's evaluations and choices in the contexts of social behaviour, risk taking and health care. Here we show that framing matters for people's assessment of the benefits of measures to mitigate the spread of infectious disease. In two commonly used frames, most subjects in our experiment drastically underestimate the number of cases mitigation measures avoid. Framing growth in terms of doubling times, rather than growth rates, improves understanding. In a non-standard framing, which focuses on time gained rather than cases avoided, the median subject assesses the benefit of mitigation measures correctly. These findings suggest changes that public health authorities can adopt to communicate the exponential spread of infectious disease more effectively. Beyond public health, the findings have applications to, for example, the regulation of the sale of financial products, retirement savings, education and the public understanding of exponential processes in the environment.   Goto Sponge  NotDistinct  Permalink

An Entity of Type : fabio:Abstract, within Data Space : wasabi.inria.fr associated with source document(s)

AttributesValues
type
value
  • Sustained non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) can contain the spread of infectious disease when vaccines or treatments are not available. The benefit of such behavioural adaptations can be modelled as the deceleration of the exponential growth of cases. Humans underestimate exponential growth, as has been documented in biological, environmental and financial contexts. Hence, they might also underestimate the benefit of reducing the exponential growth rate. Different ways of communicating the same scenario, i.e. frames, have been found to have a large impact on people's evaluations and choices in the contexts of social behaviour, risk taking and health care. Here we show that framing matters for people's assessment of the benefits of measures to mitigate the spread of infectious disease. In two commonly used frames, most subjects in our experiment drastically underestimate the number of cases mitigation measures avoid. Framing growth in terms of doubling times, rather than growth rates, improves understanding. In a non-standard framing, which focuses on time gained rather than cases avoided, the median subject assesses the benefit of mitigation measures correctly. These findings suggest changes that public health authorities can adopt to communicate the exponential spread of infectious disease more effectively. Beyond public health, the findings have applications to, for example, the regulation of the sale of financial products, retirement savings, education and the public understanding of exponential processes in the environment.
Subject
  • Virology
  • Epidemiology
  • Infectious diseases
  • Growth curves
  • Mathematical modeling
  • Primary care
  • Exponentials
  • Ordinary differential equations
part of
is abstract of
is hasSource of
Faceted Search & Find service v1.13.91 as of Mar 24 2020


Alternative Linked Data Documents: Sponger | ODE     Content Formats:       RDF       ODATA       Microdata      About   
This material is Open Knowledge   W3C Semantic Web Technology [RDF Data]
OpenLink Virtuoso version 07.20.3229 as of Jul 10 2020, on Linux (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu), Single-Server Edition (94 GB total memory)
Data on this page belongs to its respective rights holders.
Virtuoso Faceted Browser Copyright © 2009-2024 OpenLink Software