Discussion Group 4

1
Discussion Group 4
Mike Boechler Innovative Emergency Management
Claudio Cioffi-Revilla GMU
Sara Del Valle Pena Los Alamos National Lab
Peter Dodds Columbia University
Paul Dreyer RAND Corp.
Jaewook Joo Rutgers University
Jim Kvach AFMIC
Martin Meltzer CDC
Jeff Potash CIESD
2
2 Simple Questions to Address

• Can we include social responses in
  bioterrorism/epidemic models, in ways helpful to
  decision-making?
• Yes, but
• If so, how?
• Simple questions, not so simple answers

3
Issues

• What social responses need to be addressed?
• Prediction vs. Control
• What do decision-makers need to understand?
• What policy options are open to them?
• Consequences of under- or over-reaction
• Movement
• Compliance
• Quarantine Rebellion
• Credibility and Trust Willingness to seek
  treatment
• Rumor
• Rationality vs. Cognitive Biases
• Risk perception is often not rational rare
  technological hazards
• Herd mentality the role of emotion
• Media Treatment
• Subcultural Heterogeneity
• Expected Economic Impacts Delivery of Goods and
  Services
• Health Care Professional Behavior and Individual
  Altruism

4
Summary

• What social responses need to be addressed?
• Perspective affects response(s) that you will be
  interested in examining
• Those that can ameliorate/control the epidemic
  (number of cases)
• eg. decreasing personal contacts
• Means changing structure of the social network
• What is the menu of political choices?
• Policy options may be generated by analysts, but
  choice is ultimately up to policy maker
• May be temporal constraints on options and
  efficacy may change with time
• Distinction between collective and individual
  action
• Some collective action might be influenced by a
  leader
• Collective actions can be predicted
• What actions are we talking about?
• Mechanisms of collective action
• Utilitarian motivation selective incentives
• Deontic sense of obligation (social norm)
• Authority a leader can order action
• A few (6) ways in which collective action can be
  elicited

5
Summary

• What is a social response?
• Public Health Response
• Aims to manipulate the social responses of the
  public
• Consumer of the models that we create
• PHR can elicit responses (positive or negative)
  from the public depending on sender and receiver
  characteristics
• What are the strategies that can affect public
  behavior?
• Redundancy in capabilities will improve
  probability of effective response
• Redundancy in communication channels increase
  p(Hear) in Sorensens framework

6
Summary

• Risk Communication
• Use of best case scenario in a very bad situation
• Leaders must deliver timely, effective messages
  through many channels, multiple times
  (transmitter control variables)
• How leaders communicate risk is amenable to
  modeling (first step in modeling leadership
  panic)
• Also must consider receiver trust/control
  variables
• Communication from analysts to decision makers
• Can use schematic graphical methods rather than
  numbers to convey analysis to decision makers
• The right picture is worth a thousand words (or p
  values)

7
Summary

• Much has been learned in the 50 years in the
  experimental behavioral social sciences
• e.g., Prospect theory
• Quantitative models that utilize this knowledge
  are lagging and are critical to this new
  Manhattan Project