Programme aim:•To provide an accurate and up-to-date view of UK consumers during this unprecedented time•To inform you with a daily tracker of key information; with a weekly in-depth survey to dig deeper in key topics of note each weekDaily tracker:•1,000+ UK respondents every day•A consistent longitudinal view a number of behavioural and attitudinal measures to track the impact of the Coronavirus•Results updated each day on our website, with full results provided as tables / reportsIn-depth weekly surveys:•Covers a series of rotating and ad-hoc questions to further understand and explore key issues raised each week•Ability to add additional questions as needed

Coronavirus Data Tracker

As a global public opinion organisation, YouGov is privileged that so many people around the world share their views and behaviours with us every day. At this time we’re putting that full focus on gathering information about COVID-19, asking people to share their experiences of the global pandemic and using that unique insight to provide health organisations with data that helps them understand and fight the spread of the virus. Data from the COVID-19 behaviour tracker by Imperial College London and YouGov is accessible on GitHub.

Contrary to what you’ve heard, shutting down the country is also the quickest way to get it started back up again

Stop covid or save the economy? We can do both.

Flooded by the torrent: the COVID-19 drug pipeline

The world is rushing to test potential COVID-19 treatments. But do we really need so many trials? Asher Mullard reports.The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) drug pipeline is not growing at quite the same speed as the pandemic. But its rate of expansion is nevertheless cause for pause. In the months since COVID-19 has spread, researchers have launched more than 180 clinical trials of everything from repurposed antivirals and immunomodulators to unproven cell therapies and vitamin C. A further 150 trials are preparing to recruit patients.

A person is labelled as having COVID-19 infection either from a positive PCR-based diagnostic test, or by a health professional’s assessment of the clinical picture in a process described by some as symptom screening. There is considerable fragility in the resulting data as both of these methods are susceptible to human biases in judgment and decision-making. In this article we show the value of a casual representation that maps out the relations between observed and inferred evidence of contamination, in order to expose what is lacking and what is needed to reduce the uncertainty in classifying an individual as infected with COVID-19.

Causal explanations, error rates, and human judgment biases missing from the COVID-19 narrative and statistics

The Covid-19 pandemic is having dramatic consequences across the world and has generated a public debate about how exposure to a pandemic environment affects social behavior: along with signs of increased solidarity such as people hand-making masks for others, we also observe selfish and antisocial behaviors such as harnessing of essential goods. This is a key question because prosocial behaviors are necessary to cope successfully with the pandemic, but the existing evidence provides no clear prediction regarding how prosociality adapts during such a negative shock. Using data from an online experiment with ~1k participants from southern Spain, we study how social behavior evolved in a six-day period in which Covid-19-associated deaths in Spain increased from 900 to above 3000. In our experiment, participants could earn lottery tickets for a €100-prize and decided whether to donate a fraction to a charity upon winning. We find that actual donations decreased in the period under study, particularly among older people—those who face higher mortality rates. Gender, another determinant of Covid-19-associated mortality, does not predict the decrease. In addition, while self-reported social concerns did not change in the same period, expectations about others’ donations decreased along with actual donations. The data suggest that expectations partially mediate the effect of exposure on behavioral change, but they cannot account for the effect of age. Since age is at the center of public debate about mortality while gender receives considerably less attention, our results point to the potential role of public information in behavioral adaptation.

Exposure to the Covid-19 pandemic and generosity in southern Spain

Value-based Essentialism: Essentialist Beliefs About Non-biological Social Groups

Psychological essentialism has played an important role in social psychology, informing influential theories of stereotyping and prejudice as well as questions about accountability for wrongdoing and the possibility for change. Existing research has shown that people often see a social group as having a deep, underlying essence when they understand that group in terms of an underlying biological cause. Here we ask whether people sometimes also essentialize groups that they do not think of as biological. More specifically, we investigate the possibility of “value-based essentialism” in which people think of certain social groups in terms of an underlying essence, but that essence is understood as a value. Study 1 explored beliefs about a wide range of social groups and found that both biological groups (e.g., women) and value-based groups (e.g., Christian) elicited similar general essentialist beliefs relative to mere social categories (e.g., English-speakers). In Studies 2-4, participants who read about a group either as being based in biology or in shared values reported higher essentialist beliefs compared to a control condition. Because biological essentialism about social groups has been connected to a number of downstream consequences, we also investigated two test cases concerning value-based essentialism. In Study 3, both the biological essence and value-based essence conditions increased inductive generalizations (related to stereotyping) compared to control, but in Study 4 only the biological condition reduced blame for wrongdoing. Together these findings support a broader theoretical framework for essentialism about social groups that incorporates values-based essence.

Individual Psychological Responses to the SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic: Different Clusters and Their Relation to Risk-Reducing Behavior

Understanding individual difference in psychological responses toward the Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) crisis is essential to the adequate handling of the current pandemic. Based on a sample of 1,182 American adult residents (stratified for age and gender; data collection March 13 to 15, 2020), we found three distinct clusters of psychological responses (i.e., informed, panic, and ignorant). Clusters differed regarding their knowledge about the virus, SARS-CoV-2-related anxiety (i.e., worry and emotionality), and evaluation of the SARS-CoV-2 crisis’s severity. Cluster membership was strongly associated with both SARS-CoV-2 risk-reducing, reasonable behavior and unreasonable behavior. Finally, clusters could be linked to systematic differences in broader personality dimensions (i.e., Dark Triad and Big Five). Our study provides and validates a set of clusters of individual psychological responses to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and the resulting behavior. It functions as a pivotal starting point for longitudinal observations on the effectiveness of public health communications in this global challenge.

Differential virtue discounting: Public generosity is seen as more selfish than public impartiality

There is a paradox in our desire to be seen as virtuous. If we do not overtly display our virtues, others will not be able to see them; yet, if we do overtly display our virtues, others may think that we do so only for social credit. Here, we investigate how virtue signaling works across two distinct virtues—generosity and impartiality—in eleven online experiments (total N=4,586). We demonstrate the novel phenomenon of differential virtue discounting, revealing that participants perceive actors who demonstrate virtue in public to be less virtuous than actors who demonstrate virtue in private, and, critically, that this effect is greater for generosity than impartiality. Further, we provide evidence for the mechanism underlying these judgments, showing that they are mediated by perceived selfish motivations. We discuss how these findings and our novel terminology can shed light on open questions in the social perception of reputation and motivation.

The elusive effects of incidental anxiety on reinforcement-learning

Anxiety is a common affective state, characterized by the subjectively unpleasant feelings of dread over an anticipated event. Anxiety is suspected to have important negative consequences on cognition, decision-making and learning. Yet, despite a recent surge in studies investigating the specific effects of anxiety on reinforcement-learning, no coherent picture has emerged. Here, we investigated the effects of incidental anxiety on instrumental reinforcement learning, while addressing several issues and defaults identified in a focused literature review. We used a rich experimental design, featuring both a learning and a transfer phase, and a manipulation of outcomes valence (gains vs losses). In two variants (N = 2x50) of this experimental paradigm, incidental anxiety was induced with an established threat-of-shock paradigm. Model-free results show that incidental anxiety effects seem limited to a small, but specific increase in post-learning performance measured by a transfer task. A comprehensive modelling effort revealed that, irrespective of the effects of anxiety, individuals give more weight to positive than negative outcomes, and tend to experience the omission of a loss as a gain (and vice versa). However, in line with results from our targeted literature survey, isolating specific computational effects of anxiety on learning per se proved to be challenging. Overall, our results suggest that learning mechanisms are more complex than traditionally presumed, and raise important concerns about the robustness of the effects of anxiety previously identified in simple reinforcement-learning studies.

Science knowledge and trust in medicine affect individuals’ behavior in pandemic crises

In pandemic crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, individuals’ behavior has a strong impact on epidemiological processes during critical stages of the outbreak. Engaging in reasonable behavior, such as social distancing, is critical to avoid further spreading an infectious disease or to slow down its spread. However, some individuals also or instead engage in unreasonable behavior, such as panic buying. We investigate why different behavior occurs and how different types of knowledge and trust in medicine can encourage individuals to engage in reasonable behavior and prevent them from engaging in unreasonable behavior. Based on a sample of N = 1,182 adult Americans stratified by age and gender, we conclude that science knowledge has a prophylactic effect: We show that science knowledge helps individuals convert information into knowledge about the coronavirus. This knowledge then helps individuals avoid unreasonable behavior. Individuals lacking coronavirus knowledge and science knowledge still act reasonably when they have a general trust in medicine. Both trust in medicine and knowledge are crucial factors for individuals to act reasonably and avoid unreasonable behavior. Individuals with low knowledge or trust tend to engage in unreasonable behavior. Facilitating science knowledge and reasonable trust in medicine through education and targeted public health messaging are likely to be of fundamental importance for bringing crises such as the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic under control.