Covid-19: neuroscience explains why weather affecting social distancing adherence - expert comment
06 April 2020
Professor Patricia Riddell, a neuroscience expert at the University of Reading said:
"As time spent indoors increases and the weather improves, the temptation to be outside is bound to increase and the urge to go outside and break the rules will increase. The short term reward of being outside will become greater than the long term reward of surviving the pandemic safely. This is because we experience reward in the moment - we can feel how it will be outside in the sunshine and fresh air - it is easy to imagine this.
"We are much poorer at imagining the consequences of our actions in the long term because this requires hard, conscious processing (what Nobel prize winning psychologist, Daniel Kahneman referred to as slow thinking). We find it much more difficult to imagine how we might feel if we became ill with the virus, or if our actions caused someone else to become ill. As a result we are quite poor at trading off short term rewards (how I feel now) for long term gain (how I might feel in the future).
"When staying home is viewed as something that you are being forced to do, individuals will increasingly feel the need to express their autonomy. There is more mental effort involved in continuing to do something that you are told to do than something that you want to do. As the time spent doing what you are told increases, the urge to do something that you want increases.
"The longer we are told to stay indoors and the greater the urge to be outdoors.
"The way that the Government communicate with people is therefore imperative. Providing information that allows individuals to choose to stay at home and to practice social isolating will be much more effective since it will reduce the urge to want to be outside.
"Helping people to visualise the consequences of their actions - and giving them lots of reasons to stick with the long term benefits such as keeping virus free themselves, keeping their families safe, getting back to normal more quickly, helping the NHS, saving the lives of doctors and nurses and other key workers - rather than just one, can help to balance the long term rewards with the single reward of being outside."