First off, i just want to say that it’s extremely satisfying that my April 23rd journal happens to be my 23rd journal.
So.... back to COVID-19 and Behavioral Economics. Emotional framing definitely makes a big effect on people’s perceptions towards this pandemic. As we all know, there are still plenty of people in the U.S. who believe it isn’t so big a deal. This could easily be due to emotional framing thanks to the media or other sources a person chooses to consume. For example, if you framed COVID-19 as having either a 96% recovery rate, or a 4% mortality rate (they’re the same thing!), you would surely get different responses. You could even build on the 4% mortality rate figure and say 1/25. All of a sudden, System 1 treats it as a much bigger deal when compared to framing it as a 96% recovery rate disease.
Another connection is the planning fallacy, when plans/forecasts are made that are unrealistically close to a best-case scenario. This is what occurred for most countries and the WHO back when the breakout was announced a couple of months ago. Many countries subscribed to the planning fallacy and did not believe it would hit nearly as hard as we are seeing it today. Even as we strive towards the path of recovery, the planning fallacy could still affect us. If we don’t properly plan ahead and allocate enough resources like money and ventilators, this pandemic could go on for even longer than it needs to. Hopefully in the future, the planning fallacy will no longer be effective for pandemics because we will then have COVID-19 statistics, a similar case where (in theory) we have learned our lesson.
So these are two more examples I’ve thought of!
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