How cognitive biases & heuristics can perpetuate COVID denial
Why it is so difficult to convince some people that the COVID-19 pandemic is a very real danger.
As of this writing, it’s been about seven months since the COVID-19 pandemic ground normal life to a halt, and yet every day the news shows examples of people who refuse to accept the seriousness of this pandemic — people who are deluding themselves into believing that we are not in the midst of a deadly situation, despite the fact that we have passed 200K deaths in the U.S. alone. These deniers truly want to believe that COVID-19 isn’t any more serious than the flu (but it is). They want to believe that it won’t impact them or their loved ones. They desperately want to believe that they can go back to their pre-pandemic lives.
As frustrated as I am with COVID deniers, as a psychologist, I understand why their minds are so difficult to change. It’s because their brains are wired to reinforce their beliefs (just as ours are wired to reinforce ours).
Here are some of the most common arguments that I have seen.
1) I’m not old or sick, so even if I do get it, I’ll be fine.*
There are two cognitive processes working against us here. First is the representativeness heuristic. We assess the likelihood of something based on the degree to which it is similar in essential characteristics to its parent population. In this case, it means that people are comparing themselves to the population of people who have died or gotten seriously ill from COVID-19.
Many people believe that they are NOT representative of that population. Why? Because of a second process that is working against us: our mental models, or schemas. When you think “older” or “pre-existing conditions”, what is the image that comes to mind?
Stop and close your eyes and picture that person for a moment.
What did that person look like? My guess is that your mental image was of someone in their mid to late 70’s, who might be starting to look a bit frail. Or someone who looks unhealthy. The image you brought to mind probably didn’t look anything like Halle Berry, Sharon Stone, Sherri Shepherd, or Bret Michaels, all of whom are very hale-looking actors who are also over 50 and diabetic, putting them in the high-risk category twice over.
The reality is that nearly 4 in 10 adults age 18 and older in the U.S. have a higher risk of serious illness if they become infected with coronavirus. In other words, people have a much higher chance of being in the high-risk group than they want to acknowledge or accept.
* The initial message from the CDC was that older populations and anyone with pre-existing conditions was at greater risk. This is still the case, though they have attempted to modify the take-away of that message. But it is very difficult to do so because of Confirmation Bias (see below).
2) No one I know has caught it!
For this one, we can blame the availability heuristic. That is the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of things happening if examples readily come to mind, and to underestimate the likelihood if they don’t. So, collectively, we overestimate the odds of being in an airplane crash or of being a victim of a shark attack, because when those things happen, they make the news … so we are exposed to them, making them more readily available in memory than they should be based on the odds. We underestimate the chances of developing heart disease or being struck by lightning, because they don’t make the headlines, and so we have fewer related memories available than the odds would indicate.
As of the time of this writing, the U.S. is approaching 215,000 COVID-19 deaths. There are approximately 323 million people in America. So at this moment, less than 0.07% of the population has died from COVID-19. To know someone who has died, statistically speaking you would have to know around 1,500 people. Most people don’t have that large of a social circle. So people are underestimating the chances of being exposed to the virus.
Unfortunately, we are still near the beginning of this pandemic and those numbers will change. In July of 1942, six months into World War II, I’m willing to bet that many Americans thought the war wasn’t that horrendous, because at that point in time, only 32K U.S. soldiers had died. The final tally was over 400K. The pandemic’s final tally will likely dwarf that.
3) The survival rate is 99.5%!
A Facebook friend of mine recently posted this one. The framing effect and our disinclination for cognitive workload are the culprits here. We are heavily influenced by the ways in which options are framed, and whether they have positive or negative connotations. In this case, stating that 99.5% of those infected will survive is framed very positively, and our first response is to think “that’s a relief!” We tend to not look at the negative side of that, which is that there is a 0.5% death rate.
Further, our reluctance to exert mental workload prevents us from readily grasping that in a country of 323 million, a death rate of 0.5% means that by the time we reach herd immunity, with 70% of the population exposed, we will have lost 1,130,000 Americans. Were the news outlets to clearly ask people if they are willing to bet their lives on whether or not they will be among the 1 million dead if we don’t get this under control, some of those deniers might be far more cautious (because we are also very risk aversive).
4) Everything I’ve read agrees with me!
Finally, the confirmation bias is why it is so hard to change people’s mind, about everything from the pandemic to stereotypes. Confirmation bias is the tendency for people to seek out, interpret, and recall information that already supports their beliefs. Conversely, we have a tendency to disregard and forget information that contradicts those beliefs. In other words, we are psychologically hardwired to look for and better remember information that agrees with our preexisting values and beliefs.
Unfortunately, social media amplifies that effect. You are more likely to be connected to friends and causes that share your beliefs, and thus, are posting information that you will more easily accept and remember.
Confirmation biases have been a factor in everything from denying women and minorities the right to vote, to the Salem witch trials, and the Hollywood Red Scare, to the racism that is still an issue today. The problem is that there will always be information that supports whatever beliefs people hold and they will cling to that information, even if the vast majority of the evidence indicates otherwise.
So do we have any hope of changing the minds of people who refuse to believe the pandemic is a danger? Unfortunately for us and for them, until COVID-19 encroaches into their own social circles and they personally know someone who has died of it or they start to realize that people just like them are being affected, we won’t see that change. All we can do is to continue to protect ourselves and our loved ones the best that we can.
Stay safe.
