Risk Perception, Decision Making, and Risk Communication in the Time of COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented challenge to societies around the world, requiring rapid responses from educational, government and business institutions. Just as important, it has presented critical challenges to all of us, requiring each of us to understand and respond to this threat as it plays out in our daily lives.

The studies contained in this special issue, conducted between April 2020 and March 2021, were selected to represent experimental research that is relevant to this unique situation and that also inform and extend existing theory. These studies investigate three broad topics: risk perception, decision making under risk, and risk communication in the context of COVID-19.

Collectively, they advance our knowledge of risk calibration, health communication interventions, and decisions about behaviors that address risk in the context of a global health threat. Perhaps most importantly they also make a practical contribution to how we approach these issues going forward.

View the table of contents with abstracts on APA PsycNet

• Risk Perception, Decision-Making, and Risk Communication in the Time of COVID-19
  Susan Joslyn, Gale M. Sinatra, and Daniel Morrowz
• Risk Perceptions and Health Behaviors as COVID-19 Emerged in the United States: Results From a Probability-Based Nationally Representative Sample
  Dana Rose Garfin, Baruch Fischhoff, E. Alison Holman, and Roxane Cohen Silver
• COVID-19: Risk Perception, Risk Communication, and Behavioral Intentions
  Susan Joslyn, Sonia Savelli, Horacio A. Duarte, Jessica Burgeno, Chao Qin, Jee Hoon Han, and Gala Gulacsik
• Can Self-Protective Behaviors Increase Unrealistic Optimism? Evidence From the COVID-19 Pandemic
  Yan Vieites, Guilherme A. Ramos, Eduardo B. Andrade, Carlos Pereira, and Amanda Medeiros
• Math Matters: A Novel, Brief Educational Intervention Decreases Whole Number Bias When Reasoning About COVID-19
  Clarissa A. Thompson, Jennifer M. Taber, Pooja G. Sidney, Charles J. Fitzsimmons, Marta K. Mielicki, Percival G. Matthews, Erika A. Schemmel, Nicolle Simonovic, Jeremy L. Foust, Pallavi Aurora, David J. Disabato, T. H. Stanley Seah, Lauren K. Schiller, and Karin G. Coifman
• Stocks, Flows, and Risk Response to Pandemic Data
  Nicholas Reinholtz, Sam J. Maglio, and Stephen A. Spiller
• Age-Related Framing Effects: Why Vaccination Against COVID-19 Should Be Promoted Differently in Younger and Older Adults
  Anne Reinhardt and Constanze Rossmann
• Risky But Alluring: Severe COVID-19 Pandemic Influence Increases Risk Taking
  Claire I. Tsai and Ying Zeng
• Biased Belief Updating in Causal Reasoning About COVID-19
  Leo Gugerty, Michael Shreeves, and Nathan Dumessa
• Risk Compensation During COVID-19: The Impact of Face Mask Usage on Social Distancing
  Ashley Luckman, Hossam Zeitoun, Andrea Isoni, Graham Loomes, Ivo Vlaev, Nattavudh Powdthavee, and Daniel Read
• Innocence in the Shadow of COVID-19: Plea Decision Making During a Pandemic
  Miko M. Wilford, David M. Zimmerman, Shi Yan, and Kelly T. Sutherland
• To Unpack or Not? Testing Public Health Messaging About COVID-19
  Olga Kostopoulou and Alan Schwartz
• Changing Pace: Using Implementation Intentions to Enhance Social Distancing Behavior During the COVID-19 Pandemic
  Janet N. Ahn, Danfei Hu, and Melissa Vega
• Quantifying the Effects of Fake News on Behavior: Evidence From a Study of COVID-19 Misinformation
  Ciara M. Greene and Gillian Murphy
• Bring Out Your Experts: The Relationship Between Perceived Expert Causal Understanding and Pandemic Behaviors
  Jessecae K. Marsh, Nick D. Ungson, and Dominic J. Packer