Which Beliefs? Behavior-Predictive Beliefs are Inconsistent with Information-Based Beliefs: Evidence from COVID-19
Ori Heffetz and
Guy Ishai
No 29452, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc
Abstract:
We investigate the relationship between (a) official information on COVID-19 infection and death case counts; (b) beliefs about such case counts, at present and in the future; (c) beliefs about average infection chance—in principle, directly calculable from (b); and (d) self-reported health-protective behavior. We elicit (b), (c), and (d) with a daily online survey in the US from March to August 2020 (N ≈ 13,900). We have three main findings: (1) beliefs elicited as infection case counts are closely related to present and future official case-count information; however (2) beliefs elicited as risk perceptions—i.e., the chance to get infected—are inconsistent with those case-count beliefs, even when mathematically, they should be identical; notably, (3) it is the latter—the risk perceptions—that are significantly better predictors of reported behavior than the former. Together, these findings suggest that researchers and policymakers, who increasingly engage in direct elicitation and communication of numeric measures of uncertainty, may get very different outcomes, depending on which measures they use. We discuss potential implications for public communication of health-risk information.
JEL-codes: D83 D84 D91 I12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
Note: AG EH PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w29452.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29452
Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w29452
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().