Using Social and Behavioural Science to Support COVID-19 Pandemic Response
43 Behavioral Science and Economics Scholars
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This paper provides evidence based on a selection of behavioral science and economics research topics relevant to pandemics, including work on navigating threats, social and cultural influences on behaviour, science communication, moral decision-making, leadership, and stress and coping. In each section, the scholars note the nature and quality of prior research, including uncertainty and unsettled issues.
Some of the insights for communicators include:
- A shared sense of identity or purpose can be encouraged by addressing the public in collective terms and by urging “us” to act for the common good.
- Leaders and the media might try to promote cooperative behavior by emphasizing that cooperating is the right thing to do and that other people are already cooperating.
- Leaders and members of the media should highlight bipartisan support for COVID-related measures, when they exist, as such endorsements in other contexts have reduced polarization and led to less biased reasoning.
- There is a need for more targeted public health information within marginalized communities, and for partnerships between public health authorities and trusted organizations that are internal to these communities.
- Messages that (1) emphasize benefits to the recipient, (2) focus on protecting others, (3) align with the recipient’s moral values, (4) appeal to social consensus or scientific norms, and/or (5) highlight the prospect of social group approval tend to be persuasive.
- Given the importance of slowing infections, it may be helpful to make people aware that they benefit from others’ access to preventative measures.
- Preparing people for misinformation and ensuring they have accurate information and counterarguments against false information before they encounter conspiracy theories, fake news, or other forms of misinformation, can help ‘inoculate’ them against false information.
- Use of the term “social distancing” might imply that one needs to cut off meaningful interactions. A preferable term is “physical distancing,” because it allows for the fact that social connection is possible even when people are physically separated.
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Remaining Relevant During a Global Health Crisis- Part Two
W2O Group
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This W2O Group’s Corporate Relevance Report covers activity between January 1, 2020- March 27, 2020, and tracks how COVID-19 has impacted organizational relevance.
This relevance report found:
- In two weeks, the range of COVID-19 related topics has splintered significantly and left virtually no space for anything other than the pandemic.
- COVID-19 has generated approximately 58 million news shares in the last two weeks, a nearly 100% increase from January 1 through March 14.
- Health care organizations are increasing in relevance, such as Bayer, Regeneron, and Medtronic, while other organizations are seeing a decrease in overall relevance.
- Between January 1, 2020 – March 27, 2020, there were 107,000 articles, shares on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit related to COVID-19.
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Identity: The Forgotten Challenge of Remote Work
Ethan McCarty, Integral Communications Group
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Ethan McCarty discusses the challenges organizations face with maintaining connections during the transition to remote work and offers solutions to better engage and connect with employees.
He offers some best practices for maintaining the integrity of identity to aid in the workforce’s ability to accommodate change, offer discretionary effort in times of need, advocate for the company, and work productively and collaboratively.
Some of these best practices include:
- Spend an equal measure of time co-creating a new culture for a new mode of work. What are the artifacts, expectations, behaviors, symbols and rituals that will define this new expression of your culture?
- Compassionately support leaders as they make the hard turn from a lifetime of tried-and-true ways of connecting with their organizations to new methods.
- Guide and support teammates in deliberate and managed steps for reestablishing their identity in a way that allows them to maintain their personal integrity in a new work reality.
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Helping Others and Feeling Engaged in the Context of Workplace Flexibility: The Importance of Communication Control
Claartje ter Hoeven, Ph.D.,
Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences,
and Ward van Zoonen, Ph.D., University of Amsterdam
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Many organizations like Yahoo! and Best Buy initially embraced workplace flexibility – the ability of employees to decide when and where to work.
However, more recently, practitioners and scholars have raised concerns over the negative consequence of workplace flexibility. For instance, telework and remote work lead to less collaboration and social interaction among coworkers.
Through a two-wave survey, authors analyzed 329 responses of Dutch employees to examine the relationship among workplace flexibility, helping behavior, and work engagement.
Some key findings include:
- Spatial flexibility (i.e., where to work) is negatively associated with work engagement through a reduction in helping behavior.
- Helping coworkers increases work engagement but not vice versa.
- Temporal flexibility (i.e., when to work) did not influence helping behavior.
- Communication control facilitates helping behavior, which in turn increases work engagement.
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Before the Coronavirus, Telework was an Optional Benefit, Mostly for the Affluent Few
Drew Desilver, Pew Research Center
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From the 2019 National Compensation Survey conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Pew Research Center analyzed the responses of 6,470 business establishments and 1,441 governmental entities to learn who had access to telework and how this is being impacted during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The recent report from Pew Research Center found:
- Only 7% of civilian workers in the United States, or roughly 9.8 million of the nation’s approximately 140 million civilian workers, have access to a “flexible workplace” benefit, or telework, according to the 2019 National Compensation Survey (NCS) from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
- The workers who have access to it are largely managers, other white-collar professionals and the highly paid. (“Civilian workers” refers to private industry workers and state and local government workers combined.)
- Telework is more common in the private sector than in state and local governments: About 7% of private-industry workers have access to it, versus 4% of state and local workers.
- Regarding whether working from home gave them more independence, employees’ average rating was 4.09, versus 3.45 for team leaders on a scale of 1 to 5. On whether working from home reduced commuting stress, employees’ average rating was 4.11, but team leaders averaged only 3.39.
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A Renewed Call for Telework Research
Justin Walden, Ph.D., North Dakota State University
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As employees across the world self-quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a heightened attention on telework and the challenges that come with working from home. Justin Walden, Ph.D., discusses living during an age of telework and how best to communicate digitally.
Walden notes several areas of research scholars should focus on:
- The recent telework push should put a spotlight on strategic communication practitioners’ personal work routines.
- Scholars should explore the ways in which strategic communicators promote telework and communicate policy to their organizations’ employees.
Learn more about how to manage new work routines and the shifts in our understanding of work, home, and third-realm boundaries such as coffee shops or coworking offices.
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