Jonathan F. Kominsky and Elizabeth Bonawitz examine the public’s judgments of Covid-19 safety measures during one of the pandemic’s peaks. Their research project, funded by the SSRC’s Rapid-Response Grants on Covid-19 and the Social Sciences, created hypothetical scenarios to explore whether the provision of different kinds of information shaped how people viewed responses to negative events (such as public health crises). The authors found that a judgement of overreaction was typical under most scenarios and, moreover, such judgements strongly predicted whether a person followed Covid-19 measures.
Jonathan F. Kominsky
Jonathan F. Kominsky is a postdoctoral researcher in the Computational Cognitive Development Lab at Rutgers University – Newark. Kominsky got his BA in psychology from Reed College, PhD in developmental psychology from Yale University, and completed an NIH NRSA postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard Lab for Developmental Studies. He studies how the human mind understands cause and effect: How we extract causal information from the world, how we represent information about causal events and causal systems, how we use that causal information in our reasoning and judgment, and how these abilities emerge and change over the lifespan.