Local, Interactive, and Actionable: a Pandemic Behavioral Nudge
This addresses the challenge of fragmented and politicized information affecting public health compliance, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing behavioral and visualization methods.
The paper tackled the problem of low adoption of nonpharmaceutical interventions during the Covid-19 pandemic by developing CovidCommitment.org, which combines social behavioral commitment devices with interactive map-based visualizations of localized infection data, and presents a preliminary analysis of user behavior.
The informational environment surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic has been widely recognized as fragmented, politicized, and complex [1]. This has resulted in polarized public views regarding the veracity of scientific communication, the severity of the threat posed by the virus, and the necessity of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) which can slow the spread of infections [2]. This paper describes CovidCommitment.org, an effort toward enhancing NPI adoption through the combination of a social behavioral commitment device and interactive map-based visualizations of localized infection data as tabulated via a 1-hourdrive-time isochrone. This paper describes the system design and presents a preliminary analysis of user behavior within the system.