Fatalism, Beliefs, and Behaviors During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Little is known about how people's beliefs concerning the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) influence their behavior.To shed light on this, we conduct an online experiment (n = 3,610) with US and UK residents.Participants are randomly allocated to a control group or to one of two treatment groups.The treatment groups are shown upperor lower-bound expert estimates of the infectiousness of the virus.We present three main empirical findings.First, individuals dramatically overestimate the dangerousness and infectiousness of COVID-19 relative to expert opinion.Second, providing people with expert information partially corrects their beliefs about the virus.Third, the more infectious people believe that COVID-19 is, the less willing they are to take protective measures, a finding we dub the "fatalism effect".We develop a formal model that can explain the fatalism effect and discuss its implications for optimal policy during the pandemic.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 106 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.