Everyday COVID decisions - it's not about yourself

The COVID-19 pandemic is still with us, as much as we all were hoping it was all over when the previous waves subsided and restrictions were lifted.

Despite Omicron variants surging and our hospital system under immense pressure, governments are less interested in mandating masks or working from home, or indeed imposing lockdowns.

Under the mantra of "personal responsibility", doing the right thing is now left to each of us as individuals.

How should we each go about making COVID decisions? When and where to wear a mask? Work from home? Stay home more? Avoid that meeting? Not go on that holiday? Get that third or fourth jab?

The problem is that "personal responsibility" naturally makes us think of the direct impact on ourselves: "What risks am I willing to accept?"

This can make us overlook health advice and the wider implications of our decisions. Bad outcomes are then likely for everyone, including ourselves. Better outcomes happen if we see that personal responsibility isn't (just) about ourselves.

The numbers tell the tale

What we know for certain is that it's all in the numbers. When too many people reason that they'll not get too sick, or even contract the disease at all, COVID spreads rapidly. Even a small increase in transmission leads to large numbers - this is the nature of exponential growth.

From there, hospitals fill with the vulnerable. Deaths in aged care skyrocket. Large numbers of people with mild illness still impact workplaces and supply chains, as exponentially growing numbers of people suddenly need to take those few days of sick leave.

We see flights grounded, deliveries delayed, and construction stalled. Hospitals aren't able to function under the stress of high patient loads. No one likes any of that.

There are potentially catastrophic outcomes from making decisions during a pandemic in the belief that they're just about the impact on oneself.

Instead, we need to make decisions that aren't (just) about oneself.

For example, even if you're not worried about getting COVID, government and health officials have advised getting your booster shots. They reduce the risk of serious infection, and if enough people do it, it could ease pressure on hospitals and healthcare workers.

If you're able to work from home, it's been advised to do so. Even if you're confident you can afford a few days' sick leave if you get COVID now, delaying infection can help ease the burden on our healthcare system and the broader economy.

Mask-wearing, while not officially mandated, has been strongly recommended in indoor settings across the country. Wearing a mask can help reduce risk of infection for yourself.

But, whether you accept that risk to yourself or not, masks also help reduce the risk of others getting infected, which helps prevent exponential spread.

Compassion in the equation

We can expect better outcomes if we acknowledge that COVID decisions aren't just about ourselves. We must infuse our decisions with more compassion - acting to alleviate the suffering of others, and treating everyone as part of our common humanity.

Compassion helps others. But it will also help yourself because, as the saying goes, what goes around comes around. This is true for the virus itself - it comes around with exponential force when society's combined risky choices make it go around.

But we need to see that it's also true for compassion - compassionate behaviour goes around, benefits others along the way, and then it comes around to benefit you, too.

We found that simply reminding people of compassion, or making them vividly imagine a nicer post-COVID future, could enable them to better-resist urges to leave the house during a wave.

How can we help ourselves to act with more compassion? Let's turn to some research.

Vaccine research has saved millions of lives, and it goes hand-in-sanitised-hand with behavioural science, which is essential to understanding what motivates people to act sensibly and compassionately. We exemplify this here with our own research.

We found people are more likely to stay home during a pandemic wave when given "imperative" instructions such as "wear a mask" or "stay home", rather than encouraged to determine the risk of everyday situations for themselves - for example, "Go out but stay safe".

We also constructed an economic "self-isolation" game, where 11 players either decide to stay home at a cost, or go out. If a few players go out even when numbers are low, infection spreads exponentially, leading to costly lockdowns for all.

We found players don't learn to grasp the significance of exponential growth, or how their own actions contribute to it. They saw low numbers, kept going out, and were slammed with lockdowns again and again.

This is consistent with worse outcomes happening when people just reason for themselves.

Caught in the act of decision-making

To see if compassion boosts our decision-making, our next studies sought to catch people in the act of making everyday decisions, via prompts on their mobile phones.

We found that simply reminding people of compassion, or making them vividly imagine a nicer post-COVID future, could enable them to better-resist urges to leave the house during a wave.

We trialled similar reminders in a clever interactive mobile phone chatbot, and again found that these simple reminders can help people make better COVID decisions.

To conclude, our research suggests a blank appeal to personal responsibility is unlikely to work well. But honest, imperative government communication can be helpful, especially when also boosting decision-making with compassion. (There's much more research out there, including on how others influence us).

What can you do, to direct your own COVID decisions toward compassion? Try these simple tools as you're about to make your decision: prompt your compassion, imagine a nice future, or think about the exponential growth of COVID.

Or take a deeper dive into the kinds of contemplative practices that may promote compassion and common humanity in general.

Remind yourself: "It's not (just) about me."