Category Archives: Human Behavior

Human Behavior

Letters: We need to get out more but alone – The Durango Herald

Now more than ever, we need to be in nature to be healthy. There is plenty of historical, medical, observational and anecdotal evidence about this. I should know, I wrote my dissertation about it.

I am an assistant professor of public health at Fort Lewis College, and I study how human behavior affects health. I am also a former park ranger, and so I know as many Durangoans know that getting outside is great for my mental, physical and spiritual health.

And until recently, it was also good for my social health, connecting with friends by doing outdoor activities.

But with the outbreak of COVID-19, now is the time to go outside on your own. I know it seems trivial and that you can maintain six feet apart while outside but now is not the time to risk it.

We are social beings, and most social contact happens without you realizing it. Also, you are most likely to transmit the virus before you show symptoms.

While Im heartened to see so many take to the outdoors to keep healthy during this time, I am both saddened and upset to see so many groups of people doing it together. Public health only works if we take necessary measures before they seem necessary.

If it works, it will look like we overreacted. That is our goal.

Please, please, continue to go outside, just do it alone.

Sara NewmanDurango

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Letters: We need to get out more but alone - The Durango Herald

Human Behavior

Can Better Airplane Boarding Procedures Slow the Spread of Coronavirus? – Defense One

A new computer model offers a better way to understand how people move in tight spaces, which can affect how viruses spread.

Could changing the way people move and congregate in cramped places like ships or planes help to curb the spread of COVID-19? Health experts have recommended that people maintain a distance of six feet from strangers in order to avoid contracting the deadly disease. But physical distancing is nearly impossible in some instances, like getting on a plane or being aboard a ship. A group of Florida researchers have developed a computer model to help determine how people move in these very small spaces, which managers can then use to change procedures to limitspread.

On airliners, says Ashok Srinivasan, a University of West Florida professor, aerosolized infections like SARS or COVID-19 tend to have a limited spread: two rows in front and two rows behind the sick passenger. But sometimes one super-spreading passenger can sicken more than half of the plane. More than half of the cases of SARS contracted aboard airplanes occurred thisway.

One might be tempted to look at this outbreak as an outlier. But the outlier had the most impact, Srinivasan told the Texas Advanced Computer Center. Thats why modeling how quickly people tend to board planes and ships, and how long they have to stand next to people in close quarters, can help make those processessafer.

In a March 5 paper for the journal PLoS ONE, Srinivasan and his fellow researchers describe a new model that they call Constrained Linear Movement Model, or CALM, which can be used to compare various ways that people move in tight spaces,such as everyone being told to board with their zone. They claim that it works more quickly and accurately than the model currently used by the academic community, called Self Propelled Entity Dynamics, orSPED.

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CALM, the researchers write, is designed to simulate movement in narrow, linear, passageways, such as inside airplanes. Our results show that CALM performs almost 60 times faster than the SPED model. Apart from this performance gain, we have modeled additional behavioral features of pedestrians. Therefore, the CALM model can overcome the limitations of SPED in a decision support context where real time results are required, theywrite.

The model doesnt tell you who will get sick, but it does tell you how long people might be stuck next to each other in a given situation, such as waiting to enter a food hall, waiting to board or deboard a plane,etc.

To verify the model, they measured it against real-world data on plane boarding and deboarding times and then ran more than 1,000 simulations on the Frontera supercomputer at the Texas Advanced ComputerCenter.

To address the uncertainty in human behavior, we define parameters in the model (like the maximum speed of each individual) that represent the sources of uncertainty. Then we find an acceptable range of values for each parameter (usually based on empirical data) and sweep the resulting parameter space by running several simulations. This imposes a substantial computational overhead on the application, with help from supercomputer to make it possible to run the same code with only slight variations in the parameters of the problem, also called parallel parameter sweeping, they were able to speed up the simulations to the point where it could actually be useful for civilian managers trying to plan in emergency meetings. We can perform 2000 simulations in less than 5 minutes, Mehran Sadeghi Lahijani, a Ph.D student in the Department of Computer Science at Florida State University and one of the authors of the paper told Defense One in anemail.

The formula could be useful for modifying boarding procedures for passenger aircraft or, with some modification, potentially for modeling virus transmission onships.

We have designed the model for simulating crowd movement in constrained places. We have used it for disembarkation and boarding in airplanes and we believe it can be used in any similar applications with proper input files and small changes in the code, saidLahijani.

The U.S. Navy is currently grappling with trying to slow the spread of the illness on its ships. Aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt, an aircraft carrier currently docked in Guam, the The spread of the disease is ongoing and accelerating, its commander wrote in an extraordinary March 30 letter asking for Navy help in finding rooms ashore where he can quarantine COVID-sickened sailors. The carrier has been docked in Guam since last week, when several of its roughly 4,000 embarked sailors testedpositive.

The main problem, Capt. Brett Crozier wrote in the letter, is that a warship is all tight spaces, with no way to provide separate berths and bathroom for infectedsailors.

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Can Better Airplane Boarding Procedures Slow the Spread of Coronavirus? - Defense One

Human Behavior

Donald Trump: Stay home through April 30 – Washington Times

President Trump, speaking in unusually somber tones, told Americans on Tuesday to brace for a very, very painful two weeks and begged them to stay at home as much as possible through April 30, saying 100,000 to 200,000 people could die from COVID-19 despite his teams best efforts to fight the coronavirus and that they want to depress that number.

Mr. Trump wanted to get the nation raring to go by Easter, but sobering models forced him to reverse course and plead with people to work and learn at home, avoid nonessential travel and stay out of restaurants for additional weeks.

I want every American to be prepared for the hard days that lie ahead, Mr. Trump said at the White House.

The president called for sacrifices as his coronavirus task force said the virus could kill far more Americans than car crashes or influenza do each year.

As sobering a number as it is, we should be prepared for it, said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Administration officials said the models are guided by epidemiology but arent gospel. Actual outcomes will be guided by human behavior.

Social distancing, a term that has become part of the lexicon, is going to be the answer to our problems, Dr. Fauci said.

Mr. Trump said social distancing is working, noting up to 2 million people might have died had the nation done nothing.

A hundred thousand is, according to modeling, a very low number, Mr. Trump said. I think were doing better than that.

Still, the estimates are sobering the notion of 100,000 to 200,000 fatalities is double, triple or multitudes more than the number of deaths the U.S. would typically see from influenza and pneumonia in a given year.

Mr. Trump is contending with the fallout in a year in which he hoped to ride economic optimism to reelection in November.

Its a matter of life and death, frankly, its a matter of life and death, the president said. We had the greatest economy in the world. We had the best unemployment and employment numbers by far.

The sober tone is a turnabout for Mr. Trump, who one week ago pressed to open up businesses, noting the nation doesnt shut down for other drivers of death.

We lose thousands of people a year to the flu. We never turn the country off. We lose much more than that to automobile accidents. We didnt call up the automobile companies and say, stop making cars. We dont want any cars any more, he told a Fox News virtual town hall on March 24.

Influenza kills from 12,000 to 61,000 people in the U.S. per year, while car crashes kill roughly 35,000 to 40,000, according to federal data.

Estimated COVID-19 deaths dont come close to the annual U.S. death toll from heart disease or cancer, each of which kills roughly 600,000 to 650,000 per year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Still, the daunting COVID-19 estimate exceeds annual suicides, at 47,000, or deaths from diabetes, at more than 80,000.

The pandemic has hit Americans unevenly, with some unable to make mortgage and rent payments and tapping food banks while others are revving up Netflix and waiting to see whether they take a hit.

The president said everyone needs to do their part, as health care workers brave the worst.

Its like military people going into battle, going into war, Mr. Trump said. The bravery is incredible. You have lots of things flying around in the air. You dont know what youre touching, is it safe. Things are happening that weve never seen before in this country.

The coronavirus was discovered in Wuhan, China, in December. It killed thousands in East Asia before the epicenter shifted to Europe and the Americas.

The U.S. has recorded the most infections in the world, with more than 185,000 and its death toll of over 3,800 exceeds that of Chinas, although many doubt the official numbers from Beijing. Recoveries in the U.S. total more than 6,900, according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker.

Everyday life has been turned on its head. Parents are juggling telework with home-school duties, churches are streaming their services on YouTube, and restaurants and department stores are furloughing workers en masse, as governors tell retailers to close their doors unless they offer necessities such as food, gasoline or medicine.

Dr. Deborah Birx, the U.S. coronavirus response coordinator, told Americans to stay the course, noting that Washington state appeared to flatten the increase in cases by keeping people far apart.

Washington saw the worst of the pandemic early on, though the U.S. epicenter is in New York.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, said his state now has more than 75,000 coronavirus cases and 1,550 coronavirus-related deaths easily the most of any state in the country.

Mr. Cuomo acknowledged that everyone wants the crisis to be over, but that nobody knows when that will be.

It is not going to be soon, he said.

New York City has been hit the hardest, with more than 40,000 cases.

The governor said public and private hospitals in New York need to start coordinating more closely amid reports of facilities that are nearing or at capacity and that are suffering from stressed, overworked employees.

He said private hospitals in the state have to help the public ones.

When they get up near capacity transfer patients. Elmhurst got up to capacity, you had other public hospitals that had open beds, he said at his daily briefing on the outbreak.

Elmhurst Hospital in Queens has become symbolic of the strained system. Mr. Trump recently described seeing haunting images of body bags being hauled out of the facility, which is near his native home.

The crisis is hitting close to home for the New York governor. His brother, CNN host Chris Cuomo, said Tuesday he tested positive for the virus but said he will do his show from the basement of his family home.

New Jersey has the second-worst death toll, at nearly 270, while Michigan has emerged as a worry spot, with nearly 6,500 cases and almost 200 deaths.

Elsewhere, Louisiana reported 1,200 new cases in a single day raising its total to more than 5,000 while the D.C. mayor and governors in Maryland and Virginia issued stay-at-home orders this week, citing fears their hospitals will be overwhelmed.

Dave Boyer and James Varney contributed to this report.

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Donald Trump: Stay home through April 30 - Washington Times

Human Behavior

Digimind Offers Free Access to its Solution to Help NGOs and Governments Manage the COVID-19 Crisis – Yahoo Finance

NGOs, government entities, research laboratories and media eligible for free access to the Digimind platform to help them monitor social media, analyze and report during the Coronavirus pandemic.

Digimind, the leading market intelligence and social listening platform, today announced that it is helping non-governmental organizations (NGOs), government and research entities [*] as well as media [**] monitor and report during the COVID-19 pandemic by providing free access to its platform.

"In a crisis like the one humanity is facing today, our mission is important. Being able to cut the clutter is of the utmost importance when the impact of information on human behavior is so critical. It is a staunch reminder of Digiminds mission since its inception: helping our community to understand the world as it is, to understand what is truly happening, and the fight for the truth. Of course, we are not in the front line as medical staff and crisis relief organizations can be, but we have a role to play. We can help. This is why we are offering free access to the Digimind platform to NGOs and media who are actively involved in the COVID-19 crisis," said Paul Vivant, co-founder and CEO of Digimind.

Since the outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic, the volume of conversations about COVID-19 has reached unprecedented levels on the web and social media with dozens of millions of mentions every single day. Collecting and filtering such amounts of unstructured data requires enterprise-grade algorithms and computing power that most NGOs dont have access to. The Digimind platform will help NGOs crunch these massive amounts of data, and analyze them using Digiminds unique and simple 5W grid: What, When, Where, Who and How.

This COVID-19 initiative is part of the wider Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) program of Digimind, providing preferential access to its industry-leading solutions for non-profit, educational and media organizations, and helping them understand the world as it is.

This offer is available worldwide for eligible organizations:

[*] NGOs, governments and research entities can request information about the conditions of the offer and submit their application at covid19-support@digimind.com.

[**] Media can request their free Digimind Buzz Insights account at https://www.digimind.com/buzz-insights-for-journalists.

About Digimind

Digimind is the most trusted AI-powered social media listening and competitive intelligence software, designed for brands and agencies who want to accelerate digital transformation through an insights-driven approach. Recognized by Forrester and Gartner, Digiminds best-in-class technology transforms social and online data into actionable business insights, enabling marketers to effectively plan, execute, and analyze their marketing strategy.

Founded in 1998, Digimind is headquartered in New York, Paris, Singapore, Madrid, Buenos Aires and Rabat, serving more than 600 customers worldwide. Learn more at http://www.digimind.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200331005665/en/

Contacts

Aurelien Blaha, CMO | aurelien.blaha@digimind.com

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Digimind Offers Free Access to its Solution to Help NGOs and Governments Manage the COVID-19 Crisis - Yahoo Finance

Human Behavior

So Far, Much Of Missouri Seems Untouched By Covid-19 So Rural Docs Want Aggressive Action Now – KCUR

In the past several weeks, as metro Kansas City began working to avoid being overwhelmed by Covid-19 like big cities elsewhere, rural places like Wright County in southern Missouri have been barely touched by the disease.

But Wright County family physician Dr. David Barbe, along with other health care providers who work in remote parts of the state, have been pleading with Gov. Mike Parson to force their patients and neighbors to shelter in place.

Im worried about them, Barbe says. There are individuals in my practice, and certainly in my community, that would be at great risk if they were to get Covid-19.

Last week, the Missouri State Medical Association sent Parson a letter requesting a statewide order to implement the same kind of stay-at-home requirements already in place in Kansas City or St. Louis.

Parson has so far refused to do so, repeatedly citing the importance of personal responsibility as he encourages individuals to take their own measures to prevent the virus from spreading.

Wright County currently has four Covid-19 patients, whose cases are believed to be related to travel or contact with other known cases, according to Barbe. Health officials say they have no evidence of community transmission in the county of close to 19,000 people.

Barbe says that some of his patients are already staying at home, but he acknowledges that for others in Wright County, Covid-19 still seems like a far-away threat.

Its mixed, Barbe says. I would say there is a lot of concern, but often people in rural areas think that, Thats going to me something that only involves urban areas. Thats not going to affect me.

However, new cases are being identified in new counties almost every day. Jeff Howell, general counsel and director of government relations for the Missouri State Medical Association, says Missouris patchwork approach to keeping people at home wont be effective when many residents routinely cross county lines for work, shopping or entertainment.

You dont want to have people who want to go to Applebees driving from Sikeston all the way to Poplar Bluff and possibly infecting a bunch of people, Howell says.

And residents of Wright County and similar rural counties could be especially vulnerable to a Covid-19 outbreak. More than a quarter of Wright County residents are over 60 years old; about a quarter are in poor or fair health; and the county has one of the states highest rates of premature death.

However, Wright County doesnt have a hospital. Like dozens of counties in the state, it doesnt have a single intensive care unit bed.

The shelter-in-place orders can be especially important in areas like Wright County, according to Claire Standley, an infectious disease researcher at Georgetown University.

We know that the elderly and (people) with underlying health conditions are particularly vulnerable to Covid-19, and particularly to severe infection, hospitalization and even critical conditions or death, and so in that case, we really do want to be protecting those vulnerable portions of our population, Standley says.

And I think part of the shelter-in-place scenario is not just to stop transmission, but also to really reinforce protection for those groups.

While shelter-in-place orders have most often been implemented in the U.S. in areas that have identified community spread, Standley says they may be most effective before that takes place.

China actually implemented quite severe lockdowns and movement restrictions with only 30 deaths, Standley says. Of course, weve far exceeded that in many parts of the U.S., and so I think were seeing there can be really big benefits to trying to be proactive.

Standley says that if rural communities dont yet have community spreading, it still may be possible for them to achieve the goal that most cities have abandoned weeks ago: to contain the spread of the disease, rather than just mitigate its effects.

Of course, stay-at-home orders are only effective if residents choose to follow them, and given the skepticism that many rural residents have about the threat of Covid-19, Barbe acknowledges that many of his neighbors might chose to disregard an order.

However, based on his conversations with patients, he thinks a statewide order would send a powerful message. And he doesnt think such orders would face any more resistance in Wright County than they have in other parts of the state.

Thats human nature and human behavior Barbe says. I think theres relatively little difference between Wright County and Springfield or even Kansas City. There will be some people that will pay attention and do the right thing and there will be others that will think that theyre bullet proof or invincible, and they are going to go out no matter what.

Alex Smith is a health care reporter for KCUR. You can reached him at alexs@kcur.org.

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So Far, Much Of Missouri Seems Untouched By Covid-19 So Rural Docs Want Aggressive Action Now - KCUR

Human Behavior

How investors can stay rational in irrational times – The Globe and Mail

It was 2008 and James, a newly minted Ivy League MBA had recently joined David Lewiss team, at a global bank on Wall Street. The markets had been sliding since late 2007 and the Bear market was gaining momentum - downwards. It was being called the global financial crisis.

James lamented, I finally made it to Wall Street and the whole industry is melting down. I picked a terrible time to be a banker. David said, James, you picked the best time because the markets will recover and inevitably go through another bear market some time in the future. You can then remind people about what happened in the global financial crisis and hopefully help them make better decisions the next time.

We can remember people predicting that the markets would keep dropping until they hit zero. It was a scary time and some people were panicking and liquidating everything. Those who sold everything lost the most. Of course, the markets did recover and starting in February 2009, became the longest bull market in history, lasting up to March 2020.

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The world is grappling now with the economic fallout of a global pandemic. Those on Wall Street might be feeling much as James did in 2008. If well-trained professionals are displaying irrationality in the face of volatility, imagine the mindset of the average investor. In order to help investors, advisors must overcome any temptation to show fear, panic, or the pessimism that James showed. Despite our best efforts to be rational decision-makers, we often are predictably irrational. In the 1950s, Herbert Simon described people as boundedly rational - we try to be rational but only have so much mental energy and time, so we often fail. Kahneman and Tverskys work in the 1970s showed that our reliance on heuristics in the face of these time and energy constraints, can lead to predictable biases.

How can we preserve rationality in our ranks, and just as critically, amongst investors, in these trying times? Understanding the common errors made both by institutional and individual investors when volatility reigns can come through understanding the science of human behavior.

A number of cognitive biases contribute to our collective inability to let history guide us. Looking back to the stock market crash of 1928, or the financial crisis of 2008, we know that things bounce back. Confirmation bias compels us to find information that supports our view that things are crumbling -- remember, there were people in 2008 predicting that the Dow, Nasdaq and S&P 500 would go to zero. Representativeness bias leads to short-sighted decisions, sensitivity to momentary information, and a belief that current emotions, such as fear, will persist well into the future. People believe that what is currently happening is permanent and will continue even though we know markets eventually start rising again.

Relatedly, we see the bias of loss aversion taking root. People feel the pain of losses more acutely than pleasure from an equivalent gain, leading them to myopic viewpoints and frequent checking of accounts. But, loss aversion is not the end of our irrationality. As investors check their accounts, they are also plagued by the illusion of control bias, where we think we have agency and control in situations when in fact we do not. Further augmented by the overconfidence bias, many people try to make moves when they should really stand pat. These biases end up leading us to sell our portfolios in the face of downturns, to feel like we are taking action against volatility.

Behavioral economics not only pinpoints these biases, but it also provides directions for how to overcome them.

One solution is to get investors to listen to advice from experts. In a recent study by BEworks, we found that fewer people have an advisor and follow all of the advice (13%) than those who had no advisor or have an advisor and ignore their advice (21%). In the middle, the remainder have a financial advisor but only follow some of the advice.

To counter loss aversion, we can encourage investors to use mental accounting (Thaler, 1990). If people separate their money into a portion they need for short term emergencies and the rest of their money as being long term, and leave that long term money in the market knowing that it will eventually recover and earn back any losses, they can be less tempted to dump everything at an inopportune time. Another technique is long-term gain framing. Look at the markets over a 10 year period and the large drops we see daily look like small blips. One good piece of advice is to actively limit how frequently you look at your account.

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To fight representativeness bias we can use explicit emotion priming (Blanchette 2007) where we acknowledge negative emotions and confront them. When emotions such as fear and anxiety are confronted and recognized as natural responses to stressful times, they lose their ability to hijack our thinking. Another technique is to envision your future self (Hirschfeld 2011) following your dream in the future. People who took a long term view in 2008 and stayed in the market are much better off than those who panicked and stuffed their money in their mattress. Thinking of the long term can remove the temptation to react to short-term information.

Countering the illusion of control can be done by explicitly recognizing and framing the losses of forgone gains when the market eventually turns, and we know people are averse to losses. If they move at the bottom, they will lose out on the eventual rise. Another way of countering the illusion of control is by priming self consistency. Remind people that they thought carefully when constructing their portfolio, and the portfolio may have done very well for years, and this leads them to pause before unwinding it all. We like to be self consistent so when we think of all of the careful thought that went into the portfolio, we are less likely to question our previous judgement and more likely to question our current panic.

One method to combat the overconfidence that many investors will exhibit, thinking they can make the right move when there is no right move, is with information accessibility. Ask investors to name top athletes, and they can surely easily come up with ten. Next, ask them to name people who consistently and successfully time the market by selling just before the crash and buying back in right at the bottom. They will have trouble naming any and in the long run, there are none.

In popular culture, Michael Burry, the lead character in the film The Big Short is seen as correctly timing and profiting from the subprime mortgage crisis but the film leaves out the fact that Burry liquidated his positions in 2008 and missed the gains that would have come if he had waited for the 2008 and 2009 government bailouts.

David Lewis, PhD, CFA, MBA, is the Chief Client Officer at BEworks. David has held numerous senior positions including Head of Technology, Head of Marketing, President, CEO, and Chairman of the Board, at global financial institutions including Barclays Wealth USA, UBS Bank USA, UBS Financial Services Americas, ING DIRECT USA, and Bank of Nova Scotia.

Kelly Peters, MBA, is the chief executive officer and cofounder of BEworks. She pioneered the BEworks Method, which is being applied at Global 1000 firms and in policy groups around the world. She held senior positions in strategy and innovation at Royal Bank of Canada, and Bank of Montreal, and several startups. Find her on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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Dan Ariely, PhD, is the co-founder of BEworks; Professor of Psychology & Behavioral Economics, Duke University; and is recognized as a Top 50 Most Influential Thinkers (Bloomberg). Dan is also a three-time New York Times Best-selling Author, including Predictably Irrational.

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How investors can stay rational in irrational times - The Globe and Mail

Human Behavior

Data mapping is a necessary tool against COVID-19. But mass surveillance doesn’t have to be. – Armenian Weekly

This week, the Armenian government passed its most controversial measure yet in its struggle to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. On Monday, a motion that would allow authorities to access personal phone data passed a first reading in the National Assembly despite strong objections from opposition parties and concerns from privacy watchdogs. The bill was initially defeated in a second reading on Tuesday morning before being pushed through in a late night session.

Justice Minister Rustam Badasyan, who presented the bill, argued that it would simplify efforts to slow the spread of the virus by better identifying the infection rate. These measures will purportedly be limited to data collected from those already infected and only within the duration of the State of Emergency situation which is scheduled to expire on April 16. The government claims to be amending the text with explicit assurances that the actual content of phone conversations remain protected and all private data be immediately deleted once the pandemic is contained.

Still, the move coincides with a worrying trend where liberal democracies across the worldperhaps naively encouraged by the apparent success of Communist Chinas authoritarian containment model, irresponsibly endorsed by the WHOare considering unheard-of draconian measures to fight the contagion. In France, drones patrol the streets to enforce curfews. Canadas Liberal minority government has leveraged the situation in an attempted power grab, while Hungary has done away with the trappings of democracy altogether. Citizens across Europe and North America are being bluntly told to get used to a new reality where mass surveillance is the norm. No matter the approach, individual liberty is always the first victim.

Predictably, Armenias parliamentary opposition parties arent having any of it. Edmon Marukyan, who leads the liberal-leaning Bright Armenia Party (BAP) strongly condemned the measure, declaring, We are against ceding our liberties. With a flair for the dramatic, he later illustrated his point with a tweet of himself perusing through George Orwells dystopian novel 1984. Prosperous Armenia Party (PAP)s Naira Zohrabyan also dismissed the measure as meaningless. Questions arose from within the government itself about the effectiveness of monitoring phone data in cases where infections spread through social settings like supermarket visits or in public. (Preliminary data from Armenia suggests that outside of the initial outbreaks, the virus has primarily spread through community transmission. No cases have been reported in supermarkets at the time of this writing.)

Assuming that these objections are genuine expressions of concernrather than political posturingthey reveal a troubling political reality, but also a general misunderstanding of how pandemic containment strategies work.

Until humanity develops some form of resistance to the novel coronaviruseither through herd immunity or vaccination (both scenarios likely months away)the most effective containment strategy involves a combination of early detection and contact tracing. The first requires widespread accurate testing, while the second calls for massive amounts of real-time data.

Once testing equipment becomes sufficiently available, healthcare workers could identify carriers more quickly and isolate them before they have a chance to transmit the infection. The next step is to identify and isolate anyone which was in contact with a carrier during the incubation period, in doing so flattening the curve enough to relieve overburdened health services. But people may lie or honestly not recall who theyd been in contact with days before. This is where data collection plays an important role. In the words of data scientist Seth Davidowitz, Big data serves as a digital truth serum. Tracing phone records would help healthcare workers map potential contagions and quickly contain them.

Yet mobile phone tracking also beholds a proactive function for public health authorities: projection modeling. As Dr. Anthony Fauci, a leading member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, told CNN on Sunday, When someone creates a model, they put in various assumptions. The model is only as good and as accurate as your assumptions. Human behavior constitutes the most important variable in replacing assumptions with accurate projections. At this point, smartphone monitoring remains the most widespread and proven method of collecting enough sample data to predict human behavior and by extension, infection rates during a pandemic.

Mobile data tracking plays a key role in Communist Chinas brutally effective virus containment strategy. State-owned telecoms share color-coded user data with authorities to ensure that suspected carriers cant escape checkpoints. Search histories and app records are crawled through to extrapolate potential infection symptoms. Other countries too are employing variations of mobile tracking to coordinate containment efforts, but not all rely on storing personally identifiable data.

In Singapore, the governments open-source TraceTogether app relies on records of bluetooth interactions between smartphones to warn citizens who come in contact with known carriers of the disease. The Singapore Health Ministry claims that the app doesnt record location data or access contact lists, but they do have the ability to decrypt user information if necessary. Human Rights Watch is pushing for alternative voluntary methods of data sharing, like the Private Kit: Safe Paths app, which stores encrypted and anonymous GPS data locally on a users phone. Ultimately, a combination of anonymous big data collection and edge computing could provide a large enough population sample for the predictive algorithms while divulging nothing about individual citizens.

Of course, legitimate public health purposes dont negate privacy concerns. Emergencies have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have eroded, once said economist and Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek. And history has proven him right time and time again. The hopelessly bloated nanny-states which characterize western liberal-democracy in the 21st century trace their origins to the endlessly-extended emergency war-economies of the past. To quote another Nobel Prize-winning economic theorist, this time Milton Friedman: Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.

The concern is no less relevant to Armenia, where young democratic institutions remain vulnerable to populist or authoritarian whims. At the moment, thankfully, there is no indication that the authorities plan on extending emergency powers beyond the scope of the crisis. The fact that this administration has shown itself to be attentive to the privacy concerns sparked by the measure and included checks and balances into a much more watered-down third reading of the bill is encouraging. The government has already relaxed the media restrictions attached to the emergency situations legislation following outcry from civil rights groups and has treaded carefully in suspending habeas corpus.

So far, Armenias authorities have received (well-deserved) praise for their measured, yet decisive handling of the pandemic. The government has shown its ability to react quickly and responsively to a rapidly developing global crisis despite inexperience and limited resources. In stark contrast to neighboring ex-soviet dictatorships, the transparent nature of information distributionbest exemplified by daily live updates from both the Minister of Health Arsen Torosyan and Prime Minister Pashinyanhas helped cultivate an unprecedented sense of public trust and social solidarity, with potentially life-saving results.

Ignoring, for the moment, that Armenian citizens have likely been victims of illegal state wiretapping for decades, Armenia shouldnt be faulted for choosing already-proven solutions at its disposal rather than theoretical concepts, given the urgency. What matters now is that authorities seriously consider non-invasive alternatives for next time.

That said, members of democratic societies still bear responsibility for keeping elected officials accountable to the constitutional limits of their authority. Yet fulfilling that obligation requires remaining alive for the duration of the pandemic. Thus, ironically, the first step in ensuring the survival of Armenian democracy is to comply with executive orders: stay home and practice regular hygiene. The second is to lobby authorities to adopt innovative data collection methods which boost social equality and public health without compromising individual rights.

Ultimately, the real danger isnt the emergency situation itself, but when citizens come to accept mass surveillance as a new normal. Wilsons final thoughts on the last page of Orwells 1984 should resonate with Marukyan: But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

Raffi Elliott is a Canadian-Armenian political risk analyst and journalist based in Yerevan, Armenia. As correspondent and columnist for the Armenian Weekly, he covers socioeconomic, political, business and diplomatic issues in Armenia, with occasional thoughts on culture and urbanism.

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Data mapping is a necessary tool against COVID-19. But mass surveillance doesn't have to be. - Armenian Weekly

Human Behavior

The Three Laws of Human Behavior | behavioraleconomics.com …

By Aline Holzwarth

When Isaac Newton put forth the three laws of motion more than three hundred years ago, he did something radical.

It wasnt his theories or the computations behind them that were so revolutionary in fact, Newtons first law is a mere reiteration of Galileos theory of inertia, formulated 50 or so years earlier. What was radical about Newtons three laws was that he was able to distill such an incredible volume and complexity of advances in the physical sciences (see below for a refresher, in case its been a few years). These three simple laws have not only been the basis of countless lab and field experiments and a precursor to Einsteins theory of relativity, but were also used to inform the inventions and innovations of the industrial revolution and beyond.

But theres no equivalent of Newtons laws of motion in the behavioral sciences, and unfortunately Newtons work in math and physics doesnt provide much information about human behavior. Theres no direct translation of F = ma to the methods of our human madness. Fortunately, there do exist some general tendencies underlying much of our behavior.

In the spirit of Newtons three laws of motion, this article presents the Three Laws of Human Behavior.

Lets consider them one at a time.

Humans are creatures of least resistance. We take the road most traveled, or the road best paved. So much of our behavior runs on autopilot that it takes a significant degree of effort to take simple actions outside of our normal routine even when we have the best of intentions for changing our behavior. Think of how many times youve resolved to start biking to work, and how many times youve actually done so. Theres a bias we share that describes why were so bad at this, and its called the status quo bias. The status quo is a powerful force in human behavior, directly analogous to the inertia described by Newtons first law of motion: force is necessary for a change in motion to occur.

There are two primary types of forces in the context of human behavior, just as there are in physics: forces that get in the way of performing a behavior are called friction from the feeling of exhaustion when its time to exercise to the application form to set up a health savings account. Or the barriers encountered trying to make a routine doctors appointment. Fuel is the second type of force, representing anything that makes a behavior more appealing from the gamification of un-fun procedures to delivering incentives contingent on good behavior. Like the challenge of competition as reward substitution to encourage exercise.

Friction slows you down, and fuel pushes you forward. Unless there are changes in friction or fuel, you tend to stick to the status quo. But by the same principle, changes in behavior can occur through changes in fuel and friction. (For more on fuel and friction, check out this article.)

Behavior is not something that lives in a vacuum. Its the combination of a person with all their intentions, beliefs, knowledge, motivation, personality, history and so on and their environment including everything from the choice architecture of a grocery store checkout line to the lights, smells, and friends or foes surrounding them. It is a special mixture of these two types of ingredients, the person and their environment, that leads to a particular behavior being exhibited at a particular time and place.

Kurt Lewin is famous for pinning human behavior down to these two essential elements: the individual characteristics or state of a person, and the environment in which they are situated. His universal equation B = (P,E) goes way back to 1936 and is no less relevant today.

This law is more complex than it may appear at first glance, going beyond the independent observations that behavior is dependent on the person, and that behavior is also influenced by the environment. In other words, Lewins equation doesnt imply that behavior is a function of the person, or B=(P) and separately that behavior is also a function of the environment, B=(E). There is, of course, a great deal of research examining the person and the environment separately. We might observe that when someone (lets call her Emma) is stressed, she may be less likely to order a salad at her work cafeteria and instead opts for a less healthy alternative. And separately if we put up a sign encouraging salads in the cafeteria, we might see an increase in salad uptake among lunch-eaters overall. But knowing each of these on their own will not get us much closer to knowing whether Emma will order a salad today.

What B=(P,E) contributes is the interaction between these elements. It is the acknowledgment that you cant fully understand (or predict) Emmas behavior if you only understand Emma who she is or how she feels or what she thinks nor if you only understand the environment she is in. You need both.

The chart below demonstrates how Emmas lunch choice (to order a salad or not) is affected by the interaction between her state of mind (her stress level) and her environment (whether or not there is a sign advertising salad in the cafeteria).

As expected, Emma is generally more likely to order a salad when she is not stressed overall (compared to when she is stressed), just as she is generally more likely to order a salad when there is a sign about salads present (compared to no sign). But something interesting happens when she is both stressed and there is a sign. In this case, when Emma is stressed, the sign actually backfires and leads to a lower likelihood of Emma getting a salad than if there were no sign present. We might suspect that when shes stressed, seeing a sign promoting salads could come off as patronizing, leading Emma to exhibit reactance which triggers a rebellion against the salads. While this is just one fictitious and simplified example, it demonstrates the importance of considering both the person and the environment when trying to understand behavior.

There are costs and benefits attached to every decision. We may actively weigh the pros and cons of a decision at times, and other times we may not. But regardless of our attention to the tradeoffs inherent to any decision, there are often losses suffered in one area when gains are made in another. For example, say you are considering starting a multivitamin. You might say: Sure, it may very well be a placebo, but whats the downside? What cons could there be to taking a vitamin? To start, theres the fact that you have to pay for it. Vitamins may not be exorbitantly expensive, but for every dollar that is spent on vitamins, that same dollar cannot be spent on something else. Say you spend $15 for 150 3-a-day gummies, so one bottle lasts 50 days, and you have to buy ~7 a year (7*$15=$105 a year). Ten years of vitamins means giving up $1,050 that you could spend on a really nice new bike, or 235 pumpkin spice lattes or nine days at Disneyland.

This concept of what are all the things I am giving up if I do X? is known as the opportunity cost, and its a type of tradeoff that we often ignore. One way to weigh tradeoffs like these is to classify the potential pros and cons of a decision and then weigh them (a method called signal detection theory; see this article written with Dan Ariely for a deep dive). When situations are complex and involve a degree of uncertainty, we can use this method to consider the tradeoffs of a particular decision. Because our time and resources are limited, we have to choose how to spend them wisely.

Unintended consequences are related to tradeoffs. Just like the pros and cons of every decision that we dont see, there may be some unanticipated effects caused by the decision. When making a decision, we may not predict future effects that negate or undermine the positive aspects of that decision. A classic example of this is the crowding out or overjustification effect, where a positive behavior (like exercise) is initially boosted with an extrinsic incentive (e.g., financial reward), but the positive effect disappears (and may even retreat to a level lower than before the incentive was introduced!) as soon as the incentive is discontinued. Rewards like this can increase a behavior in the short term, but undermine motivation in the long term.

Often times, our actions have effects that go beyond the impact on ourselves. These types of effects on third parties are called externalities, and externalities can range from the pollution produced by cars or coal-burning factories to your decision to play outrageously loud music, which your neighbors might not appreciate very much as they attempt to have a romantic evening at home. The tragedy of the commons is a classic example of negative externalities: when each individual acts in their own interest, its not their intention to deplete the pool of resources so that everyone else suffers but thats exactly what can happen when shared resources are abused. Unintended consequences can be highly complex, as in the case of plastic bag bans actually being harmful to the environment despite the good intentions behind the policy.

When Isaac Newton proposed the three laws of motion in 1687, the physical sciences were undergoing a considerable flurry of advancement so much so that both the Industrial Revolution (~1760-1820) and the philosophical Age of Enlightenment (~1715-1789) were spurred soon after. The advances made during these two landmark historical eras (that you surely remember from your high school history class) were made possible, in part, because of a newfound enthusiasm for leveraging scientific advances to industrial applications.

Only now in the twenty-first century are practitioners beginning to take seriously the findings and methods of behavioral science to harness them within industry. Behavioral science has graduated from being a popular buzzword to a workforce necessity at innovative companies, and the understanding of human behavior is being applied to industry in ways like never before not only for marketing purposes, but in decision-making across domains as broad as banking, consumer products, and healthcare.

Like the physical properties of the universe, human behavior is complicated. And just as Newtons Laws describe the motion of physical objects, these Laws of Human Behavior aim to provide a general model for how humans behave. People tend to stick to the status quo unless the forces of friction or fuel push us off of our path; behavior is a function of the person and their environment; every decision includes tradeoffs and the potential for unintended consequences. If we keep these three laws in mind, we should be able to design better products for people to help them behave better not only in the labs of universities but in the private sector, from your savings account to your fitness app.

Illustrations by Matt Trower

Table design by Martina Diyanova

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Human Behavior

Your brain evolved to hoard supplies and shame others for doing the same – wausaupilotandreview.com

In scary and uncertain times, having a stockpile can feel soothing.AP Photo/Ted S. Warren

Stephanie Preston, University of Michigan

The media is replete with COVID-19 stories about people clearing supermarket shelves and the backlash against them. Have people gone mad? How can one individual be overfilling his own cart, while shaming others who are doing the same?

As a behavioral neuroscientist who has studied hoarding behavior for 25 years, I can tell you that this is all normal and expected. People are acting the way evolution has wired them.

The word hoarding might bring to mind relatives or neighbors whose houses are overfilled with junk. A small percentage of people do suffer from what psychologists call hoarding disorder, keeping excessive goods to the point of distress and impairment.

But hoarding is actually a totally normal and adaptive behavior that kicks in any time there is an uneven supply of resources. Everyone hoards, even during the best of times, without even thinking about it. People like to have beans in the pantry, money in savings and chocolates hidden from the children. These are all hoards.

Most Americans have had so much, for so long. People forget that, not so long ago, survival often depended on working tirelessly all year to fill root cellars so a family could last through a long, cold winter and still many died.

Similarly, squirrels work all fall to hide nuts to eat for the rest of the year. Kangaroo rats in the desert hide seeds the few times it rains and then remember where they put them to dig them back up later. A Clarks nutcracker can hoard over 10,000 pine seeds per fall and even remember where it put them.

Similarities between human behavior and these animals are not just analogies. They reflect a deeply ingrained capacity for brains to motivate us to acquire and save resources that may not always be there. Suffering from hoarding disorder, stockpiling in a pandemic or hiding nuts in the fall all of these behaviors are motivated less by logic and more by a deeply felt drive to feel safer.

My colleagues and I have found that stress seems to signal the brain to switch into get hoarding mode. For example, a kangaroo rat will act very lazy if fed regularly. But if its weight starts to drop, its brain signals to release stress hormones that incite the fastidious hiding of seeds all over the cage.

Kangaroo rats will also increase their hoarding if a neighboring animal steals from them. Once, I returned to the lab to find the victim of theft with all his remaining food stuffed into his cheek pouches the only safe place.

People do the same. If in our lab studies my colleagues and I make them feel anxious, our study subjects want to take more stuff home with them afterward.

Demonstrating this shared inheritance, the same brain areas are active when people decide to take home toilet paper, bottled water or granola bars, as when rats store lab chow under their bedding the orbitofrontal cortex and nucleus accumbens, regions that generally help organize goals and motivations to satisfy needs and desires.

Damage to this system can even induce abnormal hoarding. One man who suffered frontal lobe damage had a sudden urge to hoard bullets. Another could not stop borrowing others cars. Brains across species use these ancient neural systems to ensure access to needed items or ones that feel necessary.

So, when the news induces a panic that stores are running out of food, or that residents will be trapped in place for weeks, the brain is programmed to stock up. It makes you feel safer, less stressed, and actually protects you in an emergency.

At the same time theyre organizing their own stockpiles, people get upset about those who are taking too much. That is a legitimate concern; its a version of the tragedy of the commons, wherein a public resource might be sustainable, but peoples tendency to take a little extra for themselves degrades the resource to the point where it can no longer help anyone.

By shaming others on social media, for instance, people exert what little influence they have to ensure cooperation with the group. As a social species, human beings thrive when they work together, and have employed shaming even punishment for millennia to ensure that everyone acts in the best interest of the group.

And it works. Twitter users went after a guy reported to have hoarded 17,700 bottles of hand sanitizer in the hopes of turning a profit; he ended up donating all of it and is under investigation for price gouging. Who wouldnt pause before grabbing those last few rolls of TP when the mob is watching?

People will continue to hoard to the extent that they are worried. They will also continue to shame others who take more than what they consider a fair share. Both are normal and adaptive behaviors that evolved to balance one another out, in the long run.

But thats cold comfort for someone on the losing end of a temporary imbalance like a health care worker who did not have protective gear when they encountered a sick patient. The survival of the group hardly matters to the person who dies, or to their parent, child or friend.

One thing to remember is that the news selectively depicts stockpiling stories, presenting audiences with the most shocking cases. Most people are not charging $400 for a mask. Most are just trying to protect themselves and their families, the best way they know how, while also offering aid wherever they can. Thats how the human species evolved, to get through challenges like this together.

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Stephanie Preston, Professor of Psychology, University of Michigan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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