17:45 - 20:00
Thursday-Panel
Chair/s:
Mark Pickup
Discussant/s:
Guy Whitten
Meeting Room I

Mark Pickup, Vincent Hopkins
The Effect of Ambiguity and Motivated Reasoning on COVID-19 Behavioural Inferences

Thomas Pluemper, Matthew Shaik, Eric Neumayer
The Politics of Travel Restrictions Among European Countries

Veronica Anghel, Julia Schulte-Cloos
Preferences for authoritarian rule among Eastern European citizens in response to COVID-19

Santiago López-Cariboni, Sarah Berens, Irene Menendez, Armin von Schiller
How the communication of deferred enforcement affects compliance. A field experiment during the COVID-19 crisis in Uruguay

Petr Just
The Limits of Populist Parties at Power during the Times of Crisis
The Effect of Ambiguity and Motivated Reasoning on COVID-19 Behavioural Inferences
Mark Pickup, Vincent Hopkins
Simon Fraser University

A key challenge in COVID-19 public health messaging is that recommendations are often ambiguous. This is because public health appeals are often necessarily nuanced and cannot provide detailed instructions about appropriate behaviour in all possible circumstances. Further, conflicting advice from overlapping jurisdictions – federal, provincial, municipal – may increase ambiguity. This leaves individuals to infer appropriate behaviour in many day-to-day circumstances. When people confront ambiguity in expert recommendations, they may resolve uncertainty by ignoring recommendations they dislike. This is because individuals engage in “motivated reasoning”. On one hand, people do not wish to be wrong, and so accept information they believe will lead to accurate inferences. At the same time, when information is inconvenient—e.g. by being inconsistent with preferred behaviours—people are more likely to accept information consistent with those preferences and reject/ignore inconsistent information. Ambiguity creates “wiggle room”, allowing people to interpret government recommendations in ways consistent with their underlying preferences. People eager to resume normal life may use motivated reasoning to interpret messaging to infer that certain behaviours are appropriate when they are not. We test the hypothesis that ambiguous public health recommendations will result in motivated reasoning by those with priors that are inconsistent with the recommendations through an online survey experiment.