Lucerne School of Business, Hochschule Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland.
Center for Law and Economics, Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
PLoS One. 2020 Dec 9;15(12):e0242839. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0242839. eCollection 2020.
Exponential growth bias is the phenomenon whereby humans underestimate exponential growth. In the context of infectious diseases, this bias may lead to a failure to understand the magnitude of the benefit of non-pharmaceutical interventions. Communicating the same scenario in different ways (framing) has been found to have a large impact on people's evaluations and behavior in the contexts of social behavior, risk taking and health care. We find that framing matters for people's assessment of the benefits of non-pharmaceutical interventions. In two commonly used frames, most subjects in our experiment drastically underestimate the number of cases avoided by adopting non-pharmaceutical interventions. Framing growth in terms of doubling times rather than growth rates reduces the bias. When the scenario is framed in terms of time gained rather than cases avoided, the median subject assesses the benefit of non-pharmaceutical interventions correctly. These findings suggest changes that could be adopted to better communicate the exponential spread of infectious diseases.
指数增长偏差是指人类低估指数增长的现象。在传染病的背景下，这种偏差可能导致人们无法理解非药物干预的巨大益处。以不同的方式（框架）传达相同的情况已被发现对人们在社会行为、冒险行为和医疗保健方面的评估和行为产生重大影响。我们发现，框架对人们对非药物干预益处的评估很重要。在两个常用的框架中，我们实验中的大多数受试者严重低估了采用非药物干预措施可以避免的病例数。以倍增时间而不是增长率来表示增长可以减少偏差。当以获得的时间而不是避免的病例来描述情况时，中位数受试者正确评估了非药物干预的益处。这些发现表明，可以进行一些改变以更好地传达传染病的指数传播。
