Don’t let cognitive biases cause you to engage in risky public health behavior

Don’t let cognitive biases cause you to engage in risky public health behavior

Dana Rose Garfin, on the faculty at the Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing (University of California-Irvine) said since the COVID-19 pandemic no longer feels new, we may be tempted to ease up on the behaviors that we committed to seven weeks ago—even though those are the very behaviors that can help protect us and the people around us. When self-isolation works, for example, it creates the kind of results that prompt people to ask why we’re still self-isolating. “This creates agitation in the community,” Garfin says. “People start saying we don’t need to be doing this.”