How personal experiences shaped risk judgments during COVID-19

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, people had two important but imperfect teachers of risk. First, they learned about incidence, mortality rates, and reproduction numbers from reports and graphs. Second, they learned about the risk of infection through their own experience and the experience of others. Personal experience has been found to serve as an input for risk judgments in numerous contexts, including climate change. Here we examine how it shapes risk judgments within the dynamics of a pandemic, drawing on data collected from more than 15,000 German citizens between March 2020 and May 2022. People with personal experience of having contracted the virus consistently rated the risk of infection higher than those without such experience. The influence of others? experience increased with their social distance to the respondent. Media coverage also influenced risk judgments but to a lesser extent. We discuss the implications of these patterns for risk communication.