Probability Discounting in College Students'Willingness to Isolate During COVID-19: Implications for Behavior Analysis and Public Health

• Published in: The Psychological record 2022-12, Vol.72 (4), p.713
• Main Authors: Belisle, Jordan, Paliliunas, Dana, Sickman, Elana, Janota, Taylor, Lauer, Taylor
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: College students; Decision-making; Health aspects; Psychological aspects; Public health; Social aspects; Social isolation
• ISSN: 0033-2933
• DOI: 10.1007/s40732-022-00527-9

The present study was a preliminary analysis of college students' willingness to self-isolate and socially isolate during the COVID-19 pandemic analyzed through a probability discounting framework. Researchers developed a pandemic likelihood discounting task where willingness to isolate from others was measured in days as a function of the perceived probability of the escalation of a virus to pandemic levels. Experiment 1 was conducted immediately prior to the World Health Organization (WHO) declaring COVID-19 a pandemic and results showed that participants were more willing to self-isolate when the perceived probability of reaching pandemic levels was high and when there was a guarantee that others in the community would do the same. Experiment 2 was conducted with a subset of participants from Experiment 1 with the same discounting task, and results showed that participants were more willing to self-isolate 2 months following the onset of the pandemic, supporting the view that willingness to isolate from others is a dynamic process. Finally, Experiment 3 evaluated willingness to socially distance and introduced a hypothetical timescale to evaluate common trends with the real-world temporal dynamics observed in Experiments 1 and 2. Results showed similar trends in the data, supporting the use of hypothetical scenarios within probability discounting tasks in future behavior analytic research related to public health.