STAY · Staying at home - the interplay between behavioural synchronisation and physical distancing in prosocial behaviour
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2022-02-01 → 2024-08-01
- EU contribution
- €174,167
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Staying at home - the interplay between behavioural synchronisation and physical distancing in prosocial behaviour
The project was conceived in the context of the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and efforts to contain the spread of the virus using non-pharmaceutical measures such as physical distancing. The initial overarching goal of the project was to understand how social and emotional interaction processes can sustain prosocial behaviour that prevents the spreading of a pandemic. Due to the delay in starting and executing the project, the project aim shifted considerably: in the later years of the pandemic prevention measures shifted from non-pharmaceutical intervention measures to vaccinations. Alongside this shift, new challenges emerged regarding the combination of non-pharmaceutical and pharmaceutical intervention measures, the stability of the healthcare system, and vaccination hesitancy linked to the spread of misinformation. Within the scope of these new challenges, the project addresses three distinct issues: (i) what is the best combination of non-pharmaceutical intervention measures and vaccinations in the context of university teaching and is presence teaching feasible with new, more infectious strains of the Corona virus? (ii) Are healthcare systems able to absorb shocks to the availability of doctors, for example due to a high rate of quarantine of doctors caused by a spreading virus? (iii) How can we measure and explain the spread of misinformation particularly in online environments? Answering these questions is important for society, as a new pandemic is only a matter of time, particularly given the higher rate of zoonotic virus transmissions due to the warming climate. New pandemics will likely follow a similar development of events, from an initial phase where non-pharmaceutical interventions are central, to a phase were vaccinations are available for parts of the population and need to be combined with non-pharmaceutical interventions to achieve the desired reduction in disease spread, to a final phase were vaccinations are broadly available and the remaining challenges are more social in nature, relating to the population's trust in the efficacy of vaccinations and associated vaccination hesitancy. The research conducted in this project contributes to an understanding of the emergent phenomena at play in all these phases.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The COVID-19 outbreak is a public health and economic crisis, unprecedented in human history and as the epidemic progresses, it becomes obvious that human behaviour plays a crucial role in curbing the epidemic spread. In liberal democracies, governments largely rely on the population’s willingness to adhere to measures. Adherence to measures is framed as a prosocial act but the consequence - staying at home - isolates individuals from the collective and counteracts behavioural synchronization. This leads to competing effects on the levels of prosociality in a population. Understanding these dynamics is of great importance to evaluate the sustainability of measures but to date, there is no assessment of the influence on prosocial behaviour on the level of adherence to measures. To this end, I will numerically model prosociality in a population during a pandemic as a dynamical system. Here, prosociality is subject to a driving force (severity of pandemic), positive feedback through emotional synchronization (news, social media) and dampening (quarantine fatigue). To parameterize the model I will measure collective and individual levels of prosociality in a population using digital traces on social media platforms. By applying the LIWC method on, for example, a corpus collected from Twitter for different countries in the period before and during the pandemic, population levels of prosociality can be extracted. I will use the parameterized model to compare different liberal democracies and assess the combined impact of prosociality and non-pharmaceutical intervention measures on the prevention of the spread of COVID-19. To this end, I have established collaborations with eminent epidemiologists. Furthermore, I will implement a public monitor for prosociality (and other emotions such as anger) for European countries that will enable decision-makers to assess public sentiment in a timely and quantitative manner.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITAET GRAZ · GrazCoordinatorAustria
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union