Anticipating greater impact of a pandemic on social life is associated with reduced adherence to disease-mitigating guidelines

People regularly make decisions about how often and with whom to interact. During an epidemic of communicable disease, these decisions gain new weight, as individual choices exert more direct influence on collective health and wellbeing. While much attention has been paid to how people’s concerns about the health impact of the COVID-19 pandemic affect their engagement in behaviors that could curb (or accelerate) the spread of the disease, less is understood about how people’s concerns about pandemic’s impact on their social lives and relationships affect these outcomes. Across three studies (total N = 654), we find that estimates of the pandemic’s social (vs. health) impact are associated with individuals’ unwillingness to curtail social interaction and follow other Centers for Disease Control guidelines as the pandemic spreads. We find these associations in self-report data of participants’ own behaviors and behavior across hypothetical scenarios; moreover, participants’ estimates of the pandemic’s impact on social life in their U.S. state of residence is associated with state-level movement data collected unobtrusively from mobile phones in those locations. We suggest that perceptions of social impact could be a potential mechanism of, and therefore potential intervention target for addressing, disease-preventing behavior during a pandemic.

人们频繁地就与何人以及多久一次进行互动作出决策。在传染性疾病大流行期间，这些决策的重要性倍增，因为个人的选择对集体健康与福祉产生更为直接的影响。尽管人们对人们对COVID-19大流行对健康影响担忧如何影响其参与可能遏制（或加速）疾病传播的行为给予了广泛关注，但对于人们对大流行对其社交生活及人际关系影响担忧如何影响这些结果的理解却相对较少。在三项研究（总样本量为654人）中，我们发现对大流行社会（而非健康）影响的估计与个体不愿限制社交互动和遵循疾病控制中心的其他指南之间存在关联。我们在参与者自身行为及其在假设情景中的行为自我报告数据中发现了这些关联；此外，参与者对其居住州的社交生活受大流行影响估计与从这些地区移动手机中收集的无干扰性州级移动数据相关。我们提出，对社交影响的感知可能是应对大流行期间疾病预防行为的潜在机制，因此也可能是潜在干预目标。