Séminaire SCALab 17/10/2024

Jocelyn Raude, PU EHESP

"How do people adapt to the spread of new infectious diseases? Lessons from recent epidemics-pandemics in France"

Human behaviors play a fundamental role in the emergence and spread of infectious diseases. However, we still do not know much about how health protective behaviors (HPB) and their main social-cognitive determinants change over time in response to the health threat during an epidemic or a pandemic. During the last decade, we examined the effect of the epidemiological context in engagement in HPB through two possible mechanisms highlighted by research into decision-making under uncertainty: risk adaptation and risk habituation. These two different mechanisms were assumed to explain to a large extent the temporal variations in the public’s responsiveness to the health threat during an outbreak. To test them in the context of the COVID-19, we analyzed self-reported data collected through a series of 25 cross-sectional surveys conducted in France among representative samples of the adult population, from March 2020 to September 2021 (N = 50,019). Interestingly, we found that both mechanisms accounted relatively well for the temporal variation in the adoption of social distancing during the pandemic, which is remarkable given their different assumptions about the underlying processes involved in response to a health threat. However, the common social-cognitive determinants were found to mediate only partially the effect of the epidemiological parameters on the engagement in health behaviors, leaving to date these risk adaptation and habituation mechanisms largely unexplained.