Relationship between lay and expert perceptions of COVID-19 vaccine development timelines in Canada and USA.

OBJECTIVES: Compare lay expectations of medical development to those of experts in the context of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine development. METHODS: A short online survey of experts and lay people measuring when participants believe important vaccine milestones would occur and how likely potential setbacks were. Samples of US and Canadian lay people recruited through Qualtrics. The expert sample was created through a contact network in vaccine development and supplemented with corresponding authors of recent scholarly review articles on vaccine development. RESULTS: In aggregate, lay people gave responses that were within 3 months of experts, tending to be later than experts for early milestones and earlier for later milestones. Median lay best estimates for when a vaccine would be available to the public were 08/2021 and 09/2021 for the US and Canadian samples, compared with 09-10/2021 for the experts. However, many individual lay responses showed more substantial disagreement with expert opinions, with 54% of lay best estimates of when a vaccine would be available to the public being before the median expert soonest estimate or after the median expert latest estimate. Lay people were much more pessimistic about vaccine development encountering setbacks than experts (median probability 59% of boxed warning compared with only 30% for experts). Misalignment between layperson and expert expectations was not explained by any demographic variables collected in our survey. CONCLUSION: Median lay expectations were generally similar to experts. At the individual level, however, lay people showed substantial variation with many believing milestones would occur much sooner than experts. Lay people were in general much more pessimistic about the prospect of setbacks than were experts.

Perceiving a pandemic: Global-local incompatibility and COVID-19 superspreading events

Superspreading events are the primary mode of infection driving the COVID-19 pandemic, but their effect on risk judgments is currently unknown. More than half a million people in the U.S. died from COVID-19 in 1 year, yet public risk perceptions of infection and mortality remain variable. Using a combination of epidemiological models and the psychological theory of global-local incompatibility, we theorize that superspreading diseases create a large variance in infections across geographic localities, leading to highly variable and inaccurate risk perceptions. This is problematic because these local infection rates fail to reveal the overall severity of the pandemic, which determines the personal risk of infection at any location in the near future. We test our predictions with a simulation study and a nationally representative study of U.S. citizens (N = 3,956) conducted in April 2020. Supporting our theory, we find that localized county-level infection rates of COVID-19 are unreliable predictors of national infection rates. However, they explain a significant proportion of variance in judgments of national infection rates, contributing to judgment errors. These results support our theoretical approach for modeling this unique judgment context as an incompatibility between global and local information, providing a framework to predict how citizens will react to novel large-scale (global) risks. Our results also help explain the extreme polarization witnessed in the U.S. regarding perceptions of the risks of the COVID-19 pandemic. Accounting for the variability of local experiences with a pandemic can help future generations prepare for how to respond to similar threats more effectively. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)