School of Psychology, The University of Waikato.
Department of Psychology, University of Portsmouth.
Perspect Psychol Sci. 2021 Jan;16(1):175-187. doi: 10.1177/1745691620978205. Epub 2020 Dec 10.
In the battle for control of coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19), we have few weapons. Yet contact tracing is among the most powerful. Contact tracing is the process by which public-health officials identify people, or contacts, who have been exposed to a person infected with a pathogen or another hazard. For all its power, though, contact tracing yields a variable level of success. One reason is that contact tracing's ability to break the chain of transmission is only as effective as the proportion of contacts who are actually traced. In part, this proportion turns on the quality of the information that infected people provide, which makes human memory a crucial part of the efficacy of contact tracing. Yet the fallibilities of memory, and the challenges associated with gathering reliable information from memory, have been grossly underestimated by those charged with gathering it. We review the research on witnesses and investigative interviewing, identifying interrelated challenges that parallel those in contact tracing, as well as approaches for addressing those challenges.
在抗击 2019 冠状病毒病（COVID-19）的战斗中，我们的武器寥寥无几。然而，接触者追踪是最强大的武器之一。接触者追踪是指公共卫生官员识别出曾接触过感染病原体或其他危害物的人的过程。尽管接触者追踪具有强大的作用，但它的成功率却存在差异。原因之一是接触者追踪阻断传播链的能力取决于实际追踪到的接触者的比例。在某种程度上，这一比例取决于感染者提供的信息的质量，而这使得人类记忆成为接触者追踪效果的关键部分。然而，负责收集信息的人却严重低估了记忆的缺陷，以及从记忆中收集可靠信息所面临的挑战。我们回顾了关于证人的研究和调查性访谈，确定了与接触者追踪相关的、相互关联的挑战，以及应对这些挑战的方法。
