Should We or Should We Not Include Confidence Intervals in COVID-19 Death Forecasting? Evidence from a Survey Experiment
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929920985686 |
| Author | Jean-François Daoust,Frédérick Bastien |
| Date | 01 May 2021 |
| Published date | 01 May 2021 |
| Subject Matter | COVID-19: Pandemics, Global Politics and Societal ChallengesEarly Results |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1478929920985686
Political Studies Review
2021, Vol. 19(2) 302 –310
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/1478929920985686
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Should We or Should We Not
Include Confidence Intervals in
COVID-19 Death Forecasting?
Evidence from a Survey
Experiment
Jean-François Daoust1 and Frédérick Bastien2
Abstract
Forecasting during the COVID-19 pandemic entails a great deal of uncertainty. The same way
that we would like electoral forecasters to systematically include their confidence intervals
to account for such uncertainty, we assume that COVID-19-related forecasts should follow
that norm. Based on literature on negative bias, we may expect the presence of uncertainty to
affect citizens’ attitudes and behaviours, which would in turn have major implications on how
we should present these sensitive forecasts. In this research we present the main findings of a
survey experiment where citizens were exposed to a projection of the total number of deaths.
We manipulated the exclusion (and inclusion) of graphically depicted confidence intervals in
order to isolate the average causal effect of uncertainty. Our results show that accounting for
uncertainty does not change (1) citizens’ perceptions of projections’ reliability, nor does it
affect (2) their support for preventive public health measures. We conclude by discussing the
implications of our findings.
Keywords
COVID-19, forecasting, projections, uncertainty, confidence intervals, survey experiment, media
Accepted: 14 December 2020
Introduction
Citizens are exposed to forecasting on a wide variety of matters: sports competitions
(which country will win the world cup?), cultural shows (which artist or band will win
Eurovision?), economic conditions (what is the predicted government deficit?), elec-
tions (which party will form the government?) and so on. The forecasts that we have
1Politics and International Relations, School of Political and Social Sciences, University of Edinburgh, UK
2 Department of Political Science, Université de Montréal, QC, Canada
Corresponding author:
Jean-François Daoust, University of Edinburgh, Chrystal Macmillan Building, 15a George Square, Edinburgh
EH8 9LD, UK.
Email: jf.daoust@ed.ac.uk
985686PSW0010.1177/1478929920985686Political Studies ReviewDaoust and Bastien
research-article2021
Early Results
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