How has the daily presentation of data by experts affected our risk-taking behaviour?
All of our actions and behaviour are driven by us doing what we think is the right thing. It is interesting how people use data to inform what they think is the right thing. In a pandemic — when there is all manner of different data floating around — there are many important questions around how our leaders communicate data in a way that is true to the factual state of the world, while also being sensitive to the psychological processes involved in making sense of that data.
Think about infections and case counts as water filling up a bathtub. Every moment, more water is entering the tub, and at the same time, the bathtub is getting fuller. The water that is constantly entering the tub is the flow, and the overall volume of water is the stock. In terms of the pandemic, people either wanted to know the overall stock of cases or the day-to-day fluctuations or flow.
In our research, my colleagues and I found that
