Investigating the social dilemma of an epidemic model with provaccination and antivaccination groups: An evolutionary approach

In this study, an epidemiological model with the provaccination and antivaccination susceptible groups is proposed, and the social dilemma of the model is analyzed. During a pandemic, such as the current COVID-19, many individuals get confused to choose the option of adopting a provaccination or antivaccination strategy based on the number of infected people and the payoff of being infected. In the proposed model, people can obtain immunity either through vaccination or by getting infected with the disease which is known as natural immunity. In addition, increasing the waning immunity influences the choice of adopting the provaccination or antivaccination strategy. We used the behavior model to analyze the choice of the two strategies, where any individual can choose a strategy based on the number of infected individuals from each group. Moreover, individuals who are already infected can choose their strategy based on the payoff of their disease cost or vaccination cost. Our results show that, at Nash equilibrium, individuals in both groups behave the same. Further, from our numerical results, increasing the number of vaccinations can reduce the social dilemma whereas an increase in the waning immunity rate increases the social dilemma.

Human cooperation and the crises of climate change, COVID-19, and misinformation

Contemporary society is facing many social dilemmas-including climate change, COVID-19, and misinformation-characterized by a conflict between short-term self-interest and longer-term collective interest. The climate crisis requires paying costs today to reduce climate-related harms and risks that we face in the future. The COVID-19 crisis requires the less vulnerable to pay costs to benefit the more vulnerable in the face of great uncertainty. The misinformation crisis requires investing effort to assess truth and abstain from spreading attractive falsehoods. Addressing these crises requires an understanding of human cooperation. To that end, we present (a) an overview of mechanisms for the evolution of cooperation, including mechanisms based on similarity and interaction;(b) a discussion of how reputation can incentivize cooperation via conditional cooperation and signaling;and (c) a review of social preferences that undergird the proximate psychology of cooperation, including positive regard for others, parochialism, and egalitarianism. We discuss the three focal crises facing our society through the lens of cooperation, emphasizing how cooperation research can inform our efforts to address them. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Fear of Infection and the Common Good: COVID-19 and the First Italian Lockdown.

In the first quarter of 2020, Italy became one of the earliest hotspots of COVID-19 infection, and the government imposed a lockdown. During the lockdown, an online survey of 2053 adults was conducted that asked about health behaviors and about the psychological and overall impact of COVID-19. The present study is a secondary analysis of that data. We hypothesized that self-control, higher socio-economic status, existing health conditions, and fear of infection were all inversely related to actions (or intentions) that violated the lockdown (i.e., infractions). Using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM), we found that only the fear of infection significantly dissuaded people from violating lockdown rules. Since it is not practical or ethical to sow a fear of infection, our study indicates that enacting rules and enforcing them firmly and fairly are important tools for containing the infection. This may become more important as vaccines become more widely available and people lose their fear of infection.

Optimal governance and implementation of vaccination programmes to contain the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since the recent introduction of several viable vaccines for SARS-CoV-2, vaccination uptake has become the key factor that will determine our success in containing the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that game theory and social network models should be used to guide decisions pertaining to vaccination programmes for the best possible results. In the months following the introduction of vaccines, their availability and the human resources needed to run the vaccination programmes have been scarce in many countries. Vaccine hesitancy is also being encountered from some sections of the general public. We emphasize that decision-making under uncertainty and imperfect information, and with only conditionally optimal outcomes, is a unique forte of established game-theoretic modelling. Therefore, we can use this approach to obtain the best framework for modelling and simulating vaccination prioritization and uptake that will be readily available to inform important policy decisions for the optimal control of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Stockpiling during the COVID-19 pandemic as a real-life social dilemma: A person-situation perspective.

Prior research using economic games has shown that personality drives cooperation in social dilemmas. In this study, we tested the generalizability of these findings in a real-life social dilemma during the COVID-19 pandemic, namely stockpiling in the presence of low versus high resource scarcity. Honesty-Humility was negatively related to stockpiling intentions and justifiability of stockpiling. Moreover, we found a positive albeit weaker effect of Emotionality on stockpiling intentions. Victim Sensitivity was mostly positively associated with stockpiling intentions. None of the personality traits interacted with resource scarcity to predict stockpiling. Our findings replicate established associations between personality and cooperation in a real-life social dilemma, and suggest that the characteristics of interdependent situations during a pandemic additionally afford the expression of Emotionality.

Intergenerational conflicts of interest and prosocial behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic presents threats, such as severe disease and economic hardship, to people of different ages. These threats can also be experienced asymmetrically across age groups, which could lead to generational differences in behavioral responses to reduce the spread of the disease. We report a survey conducted across 56 societies (N = 58,641), and tested pre-registered hypotheses about how age relates to (a) perceived personal costs during the pandemic, (b) prosocial COVID-19 responses (e.g., social distancing), and (c) support for behavioral regulations (e.g., mandatory quarantine, vaccination). We further tested whether the relation between age and prosocial COVID-19 responses can be explained by perceived personal costs during the pandemic. Overall, we found that older people perceived more costs of contracting the virus, but less costs in daily life due to the pandemic. However, age displayed no clear, robust associations with prosocial COVID-19 responses and support for behavioral regulations. We discuss the implications of this work for understanding the potential intergenerational conflicts of interest that could occur during the COVID-19 pandemic.

COVID-19: Large-scale collective action, government intervention, and the importance of trust.

In this article we apply a large-scale collective action framework on the spread of the COVID-19 virus. We compare the pandemic with other large-scale collective action problems - such as climate change, antimicrobial resistance and biodiversity loss - which are identified by the number of actors involved (the more actors, the larger the scale); the problem's complexity; and the spatial and temporal distance between the actors causing and being affected by the problem. The greater the extent of these characteristics, the larger the scale of the collective action problem and the smaller the probability of spontaneous collective action. We argue that by unpacking the social dilemma logic underlying the spread of the COVID-19 virus, we can better understand the great variation in policy responses worldwide, e.g., why some countries are adopting harsher policies and enforcing them, while others tend to rely more on recommendations. We claim that one key factor is trust and, more precisely, reciprocal trust, both horizontally among people and also vertically between people and their governments - and vice versa. Citizens must trust that the recommendations they receive from the public authorities are correct, that these are in their (or the collective's) best interest, and that most others will follow the recommendations. Simultaneously, government authorities must trust that their citizens will transform the recommendations into collective action. When this situation is present, we argue that governments enjoy a large degree of collective action capital, which potentially open up for a wider palette of policy options.

Social Psychological Correlates of Protective Behaviours in the COVID-19 Outbreak: Evidence and Recommendations from a Nationally Representative Sample.

BACKGROUND: A clear picture of people's adoption of protective behaviours, and a thorough understanding of psychosocial correlates in the context of contagious diseases such as COVID-19, is essential for the development of communication strategies, and can contribute to the fight against epidemics. METHODS: In this paper, we report a survey on the adoption of the recommended protective behaviours before and during the epidemic. We also assessed demographic correlates, and beliefs (towards COVID-19 and protective behaviours, towards SARS-CoV-2 transmission, social dilemma variables, and perceived external cues) of a representative sample of British residents. Data were collected during the early stage of the COVID-19 epidemic that spread worldwide in 2020. RESULTS: Results showed a marked increase in the adoption of protective behaviour. We also identified targets for intervention in variables related to transmission of the virus and social dilemma-related beliefs. Sex differences in the adoption of protective measures, as well as differences associated with the frequency of social contacts, were associated with differences in beliefs. CONCLUSIONS: These findings suggest changeable determinants, which could be targeted in global communication about COVID-19, or in interventions targeting specific sub-groups not following the protective measures.