Anti-contagion measures restricting individual freedom, such as social distancing and wearing a mask, are crucial to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. Decision-making patterns and attitudes about uncertainty can highly influence the adherence to these restrictive measures. Here we investigated the relationship between risky behavior and individual preferences for immediate vs. delayed reward, as indexed by temporal discounting (TD), as well as the association between these measures and confidence in the future, perceived risk and confidence in the containment measures. These measures were collected through an online survey administered on 353 participants at the end of the more restrictive phase of the first Italian lockdown. The results showed an unexpected inverse relationship between the individual pattern of choice preferences and risky behavior, with an overall greater adherence to containment measures in more discounter participants. These findings were interpreted in terms of a reframing process in which behaviors aimed at protecting oneself from contagion turn into immediate gains rather than losses. Interestingly, an excessive confidence in a better future was correlated with a higher tendency to assume risky behavior, thereby highlighting the downside of an overly and blindly optimistic view.

中文翻译：

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COVID-19 大流行期间个人贴现率和不确定性感知对遵守遏制措施的影响

限制个人自由的抗传染措施，例如保持社交距离和戴口罩，对于遏制 COVID-19 大流行至关重要。关于不确定性的决策模式和态度会极大地影响对这些限制性措施的遵守。在这里，我们调查了风险行为与个人偏好之间的即时与延迟奖励之间的关系，以时间贴现 (TD) 为指标，以及这些措施与未来信心、感知风险和对遏制措施的信心之间的关联。这些措施是通过在第一次意大利封锁的更严格阶段结束时对 353 名参与者进行的在线调查收集的。结果表明，个人的选择偏好模式与风险行为之间存在意想不到的反比关系，在更多折扣店参与者中总体上更加遵守遏制措施。这些发现被解释为一个重构过程，在这个过程中，旨在保护自己免受传染的行为变成了直接的收益而不是损失。有趣的是，对更美好未来的过度自信与承担风险行为的更高倾向相关，从而突出了过度和盲目乐观观点的不利之处。