Scientific advice and the COVID-19 pandemic: Revisiting the asian disease problem

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Abstract

The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic has underscored the importance of scientific knowledge and highlighted the challenge for politicians: They had to rely on expert advice and still had to make decisions under uncertainty due to the lack of long-term health data. This article investigates how expert judgments and expert advice affect the choices between programs that are proposed to combat the outbreak of a viral disease by means of a between-subjects design embedded in a survey. We use the classic Asian disease experiment and extend earlier applications by varying the professional background of the experts (virologists vs. social scientists) within the experimental set-up. We use data from a university wide web-survey to show the persistence of framing effects and that the disciplinary background of the expert is not related to individual decision-making under risk.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Article numberedae021
Journal International journal of public opinion research / publ. by the World Association for Public Opinion Research
Volume36
Issue number2
Publication statusPublished - 2024
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0003-1106-474X/work/159171583
ORCID /0000-0001-6728-4288/work/159172041
Scopus 85191967505

Keywords