Attitudes and Risk Perceptions regarding COVID-19 Policies and Reporting Standards in the State of Florida

The COVID-19 pandemic caused a worldwide surge in the use of digital technologies due to social distancing norms implemented during the shutdowns (De’, Pandey, & Pal, 2020). In response to these new social restrictions, people and organizations have had to adjust to new ways of work and life, inevitably through the increase of technology. Through this, and the ever increasing number of people with smartphones, computers, and social media platforms, information about COVID-19 has circulated globally and overwhelmed much of today’s media. Dashboards are updating COVID-19 infection, hospitalization, and death rates daily, news outlets are sharing personal stories about those affected by the virus and reporting mass devastations, and health agencies are widening their reach in order to educate more people on COVID-19 prevention, symptoms, and treatments in an effort to save lives. And although modern technology has allowed people to remain connected and informed amidst the pandemic, it has also been a lucrative medium for misinformation, distrust in the government, conspiracies, and political polarization. 

Thus, our study examines Florida voters’ attitudes and risk perceptions with respect to COVID-19 case reporting. For the first part of our study, we were interested in learning to what extent political ideology could predict voters’ level of COVID-19 compliance and level of belief in COVID-19 conspiracy. Our results showed that both political party and pre-existing condition status are strong predictors for how individuals navigate the pandemic: the more conservative a person identifies, the more likely they are to be less compliant with COVID-19 guidelines and more likely to believe in conspiracies. We also found that those who reported pre-existing health conditions rated their risk higher than those who did not report having pre-existing health conditions. The second part of our study examined the psychological phenomenon known as ‘ratio bias’, the tendency for people to judge probabilities expressed as ratios of large numbers as more likely than equivalent probabilities expressed as small ratios, as it related to COVID-19 styles of reporting infection, hospitalization, and death cases. We then assessed voters’ willingness to comply with mask wearing and social distancing measures using the information participants received in the experiment. Although we believed that ratio bias would have a significant effect on participants’ risk perceptions and compliance with COVID-19 guidelines, it did not. We believe that this is largely due to the amount of information individuals have been receiving about COVID-19 and more significantly, individuals’ set political perspective about the virus. Since COVID-19 has been such a polarizing subject over the last year, people might have not been responding solely to the numbers and instead were responding with their political stance on the virus. 

Small ratio and large ratio reporting styles seem to influence public opinion about the same, having no significant difference on risk perceptions and subsequent compliance. Yet, political party and pre-existing condition status were strong predictors for both. Having identified that personal politics is the lead driver of Florida voters’ perspective on the COVID-19 virus (compliance, conspiracy, willingness to get the vaccine, etc.,), our most timely and general recommendation is that party leaders and political influencers take a centralized and apolitical approach to following COVID-19 health guidelines and publicly address constituents on vaccine effectiveness and safety. Research shows that unwillingness to get the vaccine has remained fairly constant throughout the pandemic: this is daunting given that more variants are emerging with higher rates of transmissibility (Delphi Group, 2021). With the increase in COVID-19 cases, and the sustained unwillingness of groups to not follow health guidelines or take the vaccine, Florida (and the United States as a whole) will continue to battle high rates of COVID-19 related deaths. Therefore, it is imperative that groups such as conservatives and young people are reached with accurate and audience-specific information regarding COVID-19.