Previously submitted to: Journal of Medical Internet Research (no longer under consideration since Apr 09, 2021)
Date Submitted: Jan 17, 2021
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
The Better-Than-Average Effect in the Era of COVID-19: Cognitive Bias in the Age of Pandemic and its Relationship to Vaccination Hesitancy
ABSTRACT
Background:
The ongoing coronavirus pandemic is an unprecedented global health crisis. Because large-scale behavior change has been critical to slowing the spread of the virus, understanding the mechanisms behind people’s decisions and behaviors to follow (or not) public health recommendations, is essential.
Objective:
In order to investigate one possible mechanism, we investigated the presence of the better-than-average effect.
Methods:
in 3066 individuals across Poland, Iran, and Kazakhstan.
Results:
Participants demonstrated clear the BTAE in all three countries. Furthermore, we found that the level of BTAE was a predictor of COVID-19 vaccination (declarative) claims.
Conclusions:
These findings contribute to the growing literature on the role of cognitive biases on health behaviors, particularly during global health emergencies. We provide recommendations for public health communicators on how to address this bias to help ensure people adopt the behaviors that are critical to combatting the virus.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.