Cornell University: Uncertainty colors pandemic workplace decisions.
ENPNewswire-September 1, 2021--Cornell University: Uncertainty colors pandemic workplace decisions
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Release date- 31082021 - Cornell University: Each day we confront risks at home, at work and in society, but the COVID-19 pandemic, including the rise of new variants, has changed our relationship with risk. As workers and employers determine health measures and back-to-the-office plans, calculations and perceptions of risk loom large.
Valerie Reyna, the Lois and Melvin Tukman Professor of Human Development and director of the Human Neuroscience Institute in the College of Human Ecology, studies risk and uncertainty, including in the context of viral infection. Reyna, also the co-director of the Center for Behavioral Economics and Decision Research, recently answered questions about workplace risk.
Question: What effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are you seeing in your research?
A: Risk and uncertainty affect people's lives ubiquitously, but never more so than during this pandemic. Some inherent aspects of risk and uncertainty are hard for human beings to understand and process. One thing, for example, is cumulative risk of infection: It's not just the people you come in contact with, but it's the repeated contacts and the cumulative probability of infection over a period of time.
There's also the indirect context that's very difficult to understand intuitively; it's my contact with someone who then is contacting someone else. So this is actually a combination of all of those cumulative contacts, and that is difficult to understand - they're very abstract - but they affect us in very concrete ways.
Q: Based on your research, what do you see happening as individuals make choices about vaccination?
A: There are a variety of psychological risks and biases that affect how people really perceive risk and how they actually behave in the real world. And, my work says, there are two basic ways of looking at risk. One of them is 'just the facts': probability of infection times severity of the disease. People are capable of looking at it that way if they have access to information.
In contrast, there's what's called the gist of the risk: We process risk qualitatively, primarily based on the 'fuzzy gist' of information that we get. So when I say something's a huge risk or that it explodes, that's a qualitative judgment about it. I'm trying to communicate a meaning behind the numbers, and that's more...
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