Many health behaviors involve a trade-off between immediate and future outcomes.

Present bias has been shown to be a significant predictor of a wide variety of health behaviors. An individual makes a plan for tomorrow, but once tomorrow comes they may experience a preference reversal and revise their plan. Present bias may lead to time-inconsistent preferences.

Present bias or hyperbolic discounting is the nonlinear and nonconstant tendency of many individuals to prefer a smaller sooner pay-off over a larger future pay-off. In the context of intertemporal choices, the costs and benefits of our choices occur at different points in time, that is, many daily choices are a trade-off between immediate outcomes (i.e., costs and benefit) and expected future outcomes. It may provide useful insights into public health policies designed to reduce the spread of COVID-19 and may be helpful in developing and implementing interventions. While multiple biases are identified in the field of behavioral economics, in this paper we focus on six that tend to be particularly relevant to COVID-19-related behaviors: present bias, status quo bias, framing effect, optimism bias, affect heuristic, and herding behavior. It also has considerable potential for providing a valuable perspective to better understand and explain COVID-19-related behaviors. īehavioral economics has shed new light on a range of risky and preventive health behaviors. The heuristics are generally useful but can lead to systematic mistakes (i.e., biases) in decision making that, in turn, result in suboptimal and harmful behaviors. These limitations lead people to apply the rules of thumb or heuristics (i.e., mental shortcuts) to make their decisions rather than conducting cost–benefit analyses when making a decision. In addition, they have limited cognitive and computational abilities, and their decisions are not based on a complete analysis of all available information. It identifies biases in the decision-making process and uses them as entry points for interventions to address particular behaviors.īehavioral economics acknowledges that people do not have infinite rationality and willpower, so they are not the rational decision makers assumed in the standard economic theory of utility maximization. The focus of this field is on better predicting and understanding people’s behaviors and choices to help formulate more effective public policies. This field of economics uses insights from the fields of psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive sciences to explain how people’s behaviors deviate from the rational choice theory and when and why people’s short-term decisions sometimes undermine their long-term interests. During this pandemic, encouraging people to adopt and sustain preventive behaviors is a central focus of public health policies that seek to mitigate the spread of COVID-19.īehavioral economics has recently received a great deal of attention in public policy making. In the absence of approved treatments for and vaccines against COVID-19, preventive strategies and hygiene behaviors such as social distancing and stay-at-home policies, avoiding touching the face, and repeated hand washing are effective options in the fight against COVID-19. COVID-19 is a serious threat to global health and the world economy and has caused widespread concern around the world. The number of COVID-infected individuals and related deaths continues to rise rapidly. The outbreak of 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has become a public health emergency of international concern.

Optimism bias examples