Text: “Moral judgments about an activity’s COVID-19 risk can lead people astray.” Sciencenews.org
Extract: “When it comes to catching COVID-19, outdoor activities, in general, are safer than indoor activities (SN: 8/15/20). But if you chose the beach or baseball as riskier, you are not alone. Two new studies show that people consider activities that they think are immoral or unreasonable as riskier — even when they’re not.
“Our moral judgments change our factual judgments about the world,” says philosopher of science Cailin O’Connor of the University of California, Irvine. Accounting for moral and other biases in public health messaging is vital to combatting the spread of infectious disease, she says.” https://www.sciencenews.org/article/coronavirus-covid-moral-judgment-activity-risk-behavior-bias
In some ways COVID-19 research is based on the natural sciences and mathematics. But the article above shows how people’s response to the pandemic is heavily influence by psychology and can also be understood through sociology, media studies, etc.