Categories:
Behavioral Economics
Economics of Health Care
Last month, I ran this pair of Twitter polls. I was quite surprised by the asymmetric responses.
Few participants think that objective risk is the leading cause of caution. This makes sense to me; high profile cases aside, I don’t see the elderly being especially cautious, or the young being especially reckless. (Though admittedly, it’s pretty hard to see anyone these days). But when they want to explain low caution, they’re pretty evenly divided between the other explanations. When they want to explain high caution, in contrast, “higher risk-aversion” is the overwhelming winner.
I’m puzzled. Are you? Why or why not?
READER COMMENTS
Steve
May 27 2020 at 10:29am
My guess is that more people identify with the 10% taking the most precautions – even if they aren’t literally a part of that group – so they attribute their actions to some logical thought process. Higher risk aversion, precautionary principle, etc.
The 10% taking the least precautions might conjur up images of irresponsible beach-goers, partiers, and – given the state of the world – hardcore Trump supporting COVID-deniers. Since the average poll taker won’t identify with that crowd it is easier to assign malice or poor intelligence (low concern for others, unreasonable optimism) to their actions.
John
May 27 2020 at 10:30am
Bryan,
The reason for the objective risk being less than risk aversion is precisely because we do not have sufficient epistemic conditions to know what the objective risk is -this leads to the paranoia that has taken hold.
However, this is completely rational. The lack of knowledge about the downside risks (what the option payoff is) is what drive behavior and not “calculated” risks.
Phil H
May 27 2020 at 9:17pm
The thing I think most when looking at these numbers is that refusing to read the tealeaves of meaningless numbers is an important part of statistics.
Various
May 28 2020 at 3:18am
I agree with Commenter Steve, who eloquently summarized my views.
Fred_in_PA
May 28 2020 at 11:42am
I wonder if the two questions didn’t draw different audiences / respondents. Most of us are more interested in what we’re doing than what someone else is doing. And, if the question is read as having accusatory overtones, most may be more interested in explaining / defending their own behavior than someone else’s. This last raises the possibility, too, that respondents put more thought into constructing a defense for their own behavior, and less into explaining those other yahoos.
(So not only would you get different audiences responding to each question, but within each pool of respondents you’d have a majority who think seriously about persuasive arguments defending their chosen behavior,and a smaller group who are more flip and dismissive in rejecting the question’s preferred action.)
Fred_in_PA
May 28 2020 at 12:15pm
Hm-m-m-m. I may have gotten my feet tangled in my own undershorts.
I was going to note that the “greater caution” question drew three times the number of respondents than did the “lesser caution” version. Then guestimate from this that a lot more people are identifying-with and trying-to-defend that “greater caution” stance.
But my own argument was that those adhering-to and trying-to-defend the “lesser caution” stance would strive for more “serious” and persuasive rationales for their behavior, and my instinct is this didn’t happen.
Perhaps the answer is that, if we pose the “lesser caution” version to a universe that is 75% or better “greater caution”, then perhaps the resulting pool of those volunteering to answer is still dominated by less-invested “greater caution” crowd. Perhaps the reason we’re not getting a more thoughtful response is that the people who would have given it got drowned-out.
I wonder what the results would look like if we asked (1) “Which group do you lean toward?” then (2) “Why?”
Wes Deviers
May 30 2020 at 8:59am
My instinct is that this can be explained largely by your inclusion of “unreasonable” before pessimism or optimism. A lot of solid data and ideas have come out since May 5 if you’re keyed in to the right places. But at the time, even myself, the enthusiastic contrarian optimist, had a pretty bad outlook.
On May 5, however, I don’t think most people would have tagged the general pessimism as unreasonable. For many, it was perfectly reasonable to be almost infinitely pessimistic. Everything was “unprecedented”, all of the generally available information was vague. The smartest people I know disagreed with vocally.
By asking for “Single Best” you pushed people into a mental choice of “Well, how much pessimism is too much to be reasonable?” versus “I know how to rank risk-aversion.” I think you actually polled people, indirectly, about the depths of their pessimism.
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