When Covid first hit, Christopher Koliba was “pretty obsessed” with watching the news and following the numbers about the pandemic.
But it wasn’t strictly the virus that Koliba was interested in. Koliba was interested in how people were responding to it — and why they were responding that way.
As a professor of social science at the University of Vermont, he’s spent the past few months researching just that.
His months-long research project aims to study what groups of people do and don’t wear masks and comply with social distancing measures, based on factors like age, class, race, and geography. But there’s also a more distinct group that his research is set to focus on.
Koliba hopes the research can help identify whether people with pro-environmental attitudes — ones who participate in outdoor recreation, have trust in science, and are invested in the environment — are the ones most likely to be wearing masks and social distancing.
Koliba says compliance with public health policies is essential for curbing the impacts of the pandemic, yet that compliance varies widely across populations.
Existing predictive models for the virus, Koliba said, don’t account for the variance in human behavior, and especially don’t account for the difference that pro-environmental attitudes may have on compliance.
So Koliba, a professor of Community Development and Applied Economics and a fellow at UVM’s Gund Institute for the Environment, and his team — two experts from the College of Medicine, a professor of data science, three social scientists, a systems ecologist, a post-doc, and a number of undergraduate computer science students — are hoping to change that.
Koliba said a lot of people associate pro-environmental attitudes with political ideologies — assuming that people with positive attitudes about the environment are typically liberal. But Koliba says the two groups aren’t as mutually inclusive as people might assume.
“Not all liberals are pro-environment,” he said. “They may aspire to be, but when we’re asking, you know, how often do you get out in nature? There’s also behavioral signals here that we’ll be studying. It’s not just, do you like the environment?”
The importance of environmental factors, Koliba said, is twofold: first, the threat of the virus is exponentially greater indoors than outdoors, meaning people who spend more time outside are better positioned to reduce the spread of the virtus. Second, Koliba said, is his hunch that people who are more pro-environmental have a deeper appreciation for the “power of nature,” and therefore, more appreciation for the power of the virus.
“The power of nature in the context of a virus is that just like you’re going to respect the beauty of a waterfall and the power of a waterfall, you respect the dangers that can come when you’re climbing a mountain, and that would then seep into your belief and value of science and wanting to take this virus seriously,” Koliba said.
The degree to which residents comply with government regulations varies widely depending on what the regulation in question is, Koliba said. On one end of the spectrum is murder. Killing someone is illegal, and so people, for the most part, don’t commit murder. On the other end of the spectrum is the food pyramid. The government tells people to eat three square meals a day, but people are much less likely to comply with that recommendation.
Since the last time the government issued regulations for a pandemic was more than 100 years ago, Koliba said it’s not yet clear exactly where on that continuum people fall when it comes to following public health measures.
Data on compliance from people all across the United States will help guide public policy on which rules are worth putting in place, and which aren’t, he said.
The study will have two major components. The first is a survey that will be taken by people in every region of the country, asking a detailed set of questions about people’s attitudes and behaviors.
The second part of the research is a game designed by UVM undergraduate students.
The game is a kind of a virus simulation, where each player acts as a character whose ultimate goal is to avoid getting sick. However, the character also needs to maintain certain levels of food, mental health, physical health, and money. To help keep those levels high, the character has to leave the house and go to stores, parks, restaurants, and work — the kinds of things that people leave their house for in real life, all with the risk of getting sick.
People who play the game can make between $10 and $40, depending on how well their character does. He said his team is also considering retrofitting the game for the college environment as schools think about how to prepare for the fall semester.
In the end, Koliba said the goal is to have a body of information from both the survey and the game that can help political leaders and scientists understand how populations are responding to the virus and the regulations related to it.
“We’re doing it to develop a deeper understanding so that we can have more targeted and tailored policy responses,” he said, “and better predictions of how, where and why his disease will continue to spread.”
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