People are less myopic about future than past collective outcomes.

Myopia involves giving disproportionate weight to outcomes that occur close to the present. Myopia in people's evaluations of political outcomes and proposals threatens effective policymaking. It can lead to inefficient spending just before elections, cause inaction on important future policy challenges, and create incentives for government interventions aimed at boosting short-term performance at the expense of long-term welfare. But, are people generally myopic? Existing evidence comes mostly from studies that disregard either the future or collective outcomes. Political science characterizes people as myopic based on how they retrospectively evaluate collective outcomes, such as the state of the economy. Behavioral economics and psychology find that people make myopic choices involving future individual outcomes, such as money or personal health. To characterize myopia more generally, we offer two innovations: First, we adapt measurement approaches from behavioral economics and psychology to precisely gauge myopia over politically relevant collective outcomes. Second, we estimate myopia using the same approach for collective political outcomes in both past and future. We conduct two surveys on three different samples (including a large probability-based sample) asking respondents to evaluate national conditions randomly described as past or future while holding constant the domain, information about conditions, and the elicitation method. Results show that prospective evaluations are significantly less myopic than retrospective evaluations. People are often not myopic at all when looking to the future. This surprising pattern calls for more research to probe its robustness and spell out how low prospective myopia might lead to forward-looking policy.

Vaccine Hesitancy and Betrayal Aversion.

The determinants of vaccine hesitancy remain complex and context specific. Betrayal aversion occurs when an individual is hesitant to risk being betrayed in an environment involving trust. In this pre-registered vignette experiment, we show that betrayal aversion is not captured by current vaccine hesitancy measures despite representing a significant source of unwillingness to be vaccinated. Our survey instrument was administered to 888 United States residents via Amazon Mechanical Turk in March 2021. We find that over a third of participants have betrayal averse preferences, resulting in an 8-26% decline in vaccine acceptance, depending on the betrayal source. Interestingly, attributing betrayal risk to scientists or government results in the greatest declines in vaccine acceptance. We explore an exogenous message intervention and show that an otherwise effective message acts narrowly and fails to reduce betrayal aversion. Our results demonstrate the importance of betrayal aversion as a preference construct in the decision to vaccinate.

Gender Differences in Fear and Risk Perception During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led many people to suffer from emotional distress. Previous studies suggest that women process and express affective experiences, such as fear, with a greater intensity compared to men. We administered an online survey to a sample of participants in the United States that measures fear of COVID-19, perceptions about health and financial risks, and preventative measures taken. Despite the empirical fact that men are more likely to experience adverse health consequences from COVID-19, women report greater fear and more negative expectations about health-related consequences of COVID-19 than men. However, women are more optimistic than men regarding the financial consequences of the pandemic. Women also report more negative emotional experiences generally during the pandemic, particularly in situations where other people or the government take actions that make matters worse. Though women report taking more preventative measures than men in response to the pandemic, gender differences in behavior are reduced after controlling for fear. These results shed light on how differences in emotional experiences of the pandemic may inform policy interventions.