How the COVID-19 pandemic influences judgments of risk and benefit: the role of negative emotions

Abstract

The outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and its worldwide spread has an unprecedented impact on many people's daily life. As an external crisis event that is not going to end any time soon, will COVID-19 affect people’s risk judgment towards other risk items in daily life? The present study addresses this gap by examining the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on judgments of risk and benefit, and further exploring the underlying mechanisms. Three hundred and forty-nine participants were recruited and divided into two groups based on whether they were severely affected or mildly affected by COVID-19. The results showed that the severely affected group (vs. the mildly affected group) gave higher judgments of risk and lower judgments of benefit towards risk items such as “air travel” and “nuclear power plant,” and these effects were mediated by the COVID-19-induced negative emotions (fear and anxiety). This study suggests that the adverse effects brought from one external crisis event (e.g., the current COVID-19 pandemic) will spill over and interfere with the judgment of the decision-maker on other routine matters through negative emotions.

Keywords:

• COVID-19
• risk judgment
• judgments of risk and benefit
• affect heuristic
• negative emotions

Declaration of interest statement

Authors indicate that there is no conflict of interests.

Notes

1 Before conducting this study, we conducted a pilot experiment with 45 participants (M_age = 28.75 ± 5.88, women = 58%) to examine emotions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. They come from different sources with the samples in the formal experiment. This pilot experiment was based on the Discrete Emotions Questionnaire (DEQ) developed by Harmon-Jones, Bastian, and Harmon-Jones (2016), which includes anger, disgust, fear, anxiety, sadness, desire, relaxation, and happiness. Participants were asked to evaluate the degree of the above emotions caused by COVID-19 in a 7-point scale (1 = very low, 7 = very high). Results showed that the scores of emotional arousal in descending order were fear (6.89 ± 1.32), anxiety (6.43 ± 1.14), sadness (5.01 ± 1.43), anger (4.12 ± 1.32), disgust (2.36 ± 1.01), desire (1.25 ± 0.78), relaxation (1.14 ± 0.67), and happiness (1.08 ± 0.80), indicating that fear and anxiety were the two strongest emotions.

2 This time period was at the rapid outbreak phase of COVID-19 in China, and the number of confirmed cases dramatically increased from 24363 to 46550. During the study period, China was the country most affected by COVID-19 and more than 99% of confirmed cases in the world were in China (WHO 2020a; WHO 2020b). During the 15 days before this study, the Chinese public was persistently responding to the threat of COVID-19. Therefore, this phase was considered suitable for this study.

3 It was difficult to conduct the field experiment during the pandemic due to the quarantine and traffic restrictions. Therefore, an online survey platform was used. The data were collected twice: The first time was from February 4 to 7, 2020 (n = 269) and the second time was from February 9 to 12, 2020 (n = 104). There were no differences in behavioral responses (ps > 0.05) and demographic variables (ps > 0.05) between the two collection times.

4 Other cities do not include all the cities in Hubei province which were severely affected by COVID-19. Up until the end of the study, there were 32994 confirmed cases in Wuhan and the city with the next highest number of confirmed cases was Wenzhou (n = 490). The situation in Wuhan was significantly more serious than other cities.

5 Data on aggregated inherent risk preference and perceived trust in government were obtained from the Chinese Family Database, a national database with representative samples (n = 40011). The GDPs in 2019 data were obtained from the National Bureau of Statistics of China.