This rapid, narrative review summarizes useful evidence from behavioral science for fighting the COVID-19 outbreak. We undertook an extensive, multi-disciplinary literature search covering five issues: handwashing, face touching, self-isolation, public-spirited behavior, and responses to crisis communication. The search identified more than 100 relevant papers. We find effective behavioral interventions to increase handwashing, but not to reduce face touching. Social supports and behavioral plans can reduce the negative psychological effects of isolation, potentially reducing the disincentive to isolate. Public-spirited behavior is more likely with frequent communication of what is “best for all”, strong group identity, and social disapproval of noncompliance. Effective crisis communication involves speed, honesty, credibility, empathy, and promoting useful individual actions. Risks are probably best communicated through numbers, with ranges to describe uncertainty – simply stating a maximum may bias public perception. The findings aim to be useful not only for government and public health authorities, but for organizations and communities.

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Using Behavioral Science to help fight the Coronavirus

Law and Social Norms

A large literature shares the view that social norms shape human cooperation, but without a clean empirical identification of the relevant norms almost every behaviour can be rationalized as norm driven, thus rendering norms useless as an explanatory construct This raises the question of whether social norms are indeed causal drivers of behaviour and can convincingly explain major cooperation-related regularities Here, we show that the norm of conditional cooperation provides such an explanation, that powerful methods for its empirical identification exist and that social norms have causal effects Norm compliance rests on fundamental human motives (‘social preferences’) that also imply a willingness to punish free-riders, but normative constraints on peer punishment are important for its effectiveness and welfare properties If given the chance, a large majority of people favour the imposition of such constraints through the migration to institutional environments that enable the normative guidance of cooperation and norm enforcement behaviours Fehr and Schurtenberger show that the prevailing evidence supports the view that social norms are causal drivers of human cooperation and explain major cooperation-related regularities Norms also guide peer punishment and people have strong preferences for institutions that support norm formation

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Normative foundations of human cooperation

Access to schools achieves only so much if quality is poor With per-capita gross domestic product (GDP) growing by an average of 4.5% annually since 1960, people in East Asia are about nine times as prosperous as two generations ago. By contrast, the average person in Latin America is only about two and a half times as prosperous. Over the past quarter-century, both theoretical and empirical analyses of possible drivers of the different growth rates seen around the world invariably assign an important role to human capital (1–4). This has led to development policies focused on increasing enrollment and retention in schools. We argue, however, that too much attention is paid to the time spent in school, and too little is paid to the quality of the schools and the types of skills developed there.

Knowledge capital, growth, and the East Asian miracle Access to schools achieves only so much if quality is poor

Communication lays the foundation for human cooperation. It is also crucial for multi-agent cooperation. However, existing work focuses on broadcast communication, which is not only impractical but also leads to information redundancy that could even impair the learning process. To tackle these difficulties, we propose \textit{Individually Inferred Communication} (I2C), a simple yet effective model to enable agents to learn a prior for agent-agent communication. The prior knowledge is learned via causal inference and realized by a feed-forward neural network that maps the agent's local observation to a belief about who to communicate with. The influence of one agent on another is inferred via the joint action-value function in multi-agent reinforcement learning and quantified to label the necessity of agent-agent communication. Furthermore, the agent policy is regularized to better exploit communicated messages. Empirically, we show that I2C can not only reduce communication overhead but also improve the performance in a variety of multi-agent cooperative scenarios, comparing to existing methods.

/pdf/learning-individually-inferred-communication-for-multi-agent-3h6s6repe5.pdf

Learning Individually Inferred Communication for Multi-Agent Cooperation

Social norms are a ubiquitous feature of social life and pervade almost every aspect of human social interaction. However, despite their importance we still have relatively little empirical knowledge about the forces that drive the formation, the maintenance and the decay of social norms. In particular, our knowledge about how norms affect behavior and how norm obedience and violations shape subsequent normative standards is quite limited. Here, we present a new method that makes norms identifiable and continuously observable and, thus, empirically measurable. We show – in the context of public goods provision – the quick emergence of a widely accepted social cooperation norm that demands high contributions but – in the absence of the punishment of free-riders – norm violations are frequent and, therefore, the initial normative consensus as well as the high cooperation demands required by the norm break down. However, when peer punishment is possible, norm violations are rare from the beginning and a strong and stable normative consensus as well as high contribution requests prevail throughout. Thus, when norm compliance is costly social norms tend to unravel unless norm violations are kept to a minimum. In addition, our results indicate that – in an environment that has previously shown to be detrimental for cooperation and welfare – the opportunity to form a social norm unambiguously causes high public good contributions and group welfare when peer-punishment is possible.

https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/147925/1/econwp278_Abstract.pdf

Ivo Schurtenberger

Papers

Normative foundations of human cooperation

The dynamics of norm formation and norm decay