Boosting choice and cooperation

In order to explore effective ways of boosting wellbeing via better choices and increased cooperation, this WP will perform a series of experimental and field studies on three crucial aspects of healthcare behaviors, both at the individual and at the social level:

• Information uses in healthcare issues: This WP will conduct experimental and field studies to test how specific anti-disinformation boosting techniques, such as inoculation approaches (Cook et al., 2017; Van der Linden et al., 2017; Maertens et al, 2021), affect not only people’s ability to discriminate between reliable and unreliable information sources on healthcare issues, but also their subsequent behavioural choices, e.g. their willingness to comment and/or re-share such contents
• Cooperation dilemmas in collective healthcare problems: The wellbeing and smooth functioning of social relationships and communities is often undermined by conflicts between short-term individual gains and long-term collective interests, what have been called ‘social dilemmas’. In this WP we will leverage previous findings on the role of trust in modulating cooperative behaviours in social dilemmas on natural disaster prevention (Felletti, 2018; Felletti & Paglieri, 2019), with the aim of extending these results to healthcare issues (Felletti, 2021): our experimental designs will also benefit from past survey work on trust in healthcare institutions and vaccines in relation to the Covid-19 pandemics (Falcone et al., 2020; 2022), which was conducted by the same research group involved in this proposal.
• Redefining wellbeing in healthcare: In healthcare scenarios, correct choices are often costly – that is, there is a trade-off between the relevant healthcare gains and some other losses in terms of wellbeing. Building on previous work on the social costs of wearing sanitary masks (Marini et al., 2021; 2022) and their effects as social signals (Olivera-La Rosa et al., 2020), we will develop and test specific behavioural interventions to boost facemask wearing by explicitly addressing its social costs.