Socially Optimal Mistakes? Debiasing COVID-19 Mortality Risk Perceptions and Prosocial Behavior

Martin Abel, Tanya Byker () and Jeffrey Carpenter
Additional contact information
Tanya Byker: Middlebury College

No 13560, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: The perception of risk affects how people behave during crises. We conduct a series of experiments to explore how people form COVID-19 mortality risk beliefs and the implications for prosocial behavior. We first document that people overestimate their own risk and that of young people, while underestimating the risk old people face. We show that the availability heuristic contributes to these biased beliefs. Using information about the actual risk to debias people's own risk perception does not affect donations to the Centers for Disease Control but does decrease the amount of time invested in learning how to protect older people. This constitutes a debiasing social dilemma. Additionally providing information on the risk for the elderly, however, counteracts these negative effects. Importantly, debiasing seems to operate through the subjective categorization of and emotional response to new information.

Keywords: experiment; risk perception; prosocial behavior; debiasing; COVID-19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D91 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 49 pages
Date: 2020-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-exp and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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Journal Article: Socially optimal mistakes? debiasing COVID-19 mortality risk perceptions and prosocial behavior (2021)
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