Mass fear decreases when measures to contain pandemics are effective

If infection numbers drop significantly over the course of a pandemic in response to policy measures, this lowers people's sense of fear and panic-related behaviour more strongly than the infection rates and the measures themselves. That is the result of a study by Professor Dr Michael M. Bechtel, member of the Cluster of Excellence ECONtribute and Professor of Political Economy at the University of Cologne, Professor Dr William O'Brochta (Louisiana Tech University), and Professor Dr Margit Tavits (Washington University in St. Louis), which has recently been published in the Journal of Experimental Political Science. To explore the impact of political measures on mass fear during a pandemic, the researchers interviewed almost 5,500 participants in the United States in the spring of 2020 as part of a survey experiment mimicking the COVID-19 pandemic. Respondents were shown progressions of a wave of infections and asked to rate how scared they were using a variety of questions for each scenario. In each case, the researchers varied how severe the outbreak was, how quickly and strongly policymakers responded, and how infection numbers evolved two weeks later. The result: participants' anxiety levels increased by an average of two to eight percentage points with more severe infection outbreaks. How quickly and with which measures policy makers reacted hardly influenced fear and related behaviour such as panic buying.