Researchers have researched a lot about the coronavirus in these 233 days since the time when officials in China reported the cases of a then-unknown disease to the World Health Organization. Whatever they’ve learned from such a disease upended their early assumptions about the virus. The changes that have already made are not only hard to keep track of; they also make it hard to adjust to new recommendations.
In the beginning what some researchers have thought about the corona virus is that it spread through droplets of mucus or spit between people who are in close contact to each other. But now, we all know that it can also be spread through the air.
Then Researchers thought that the virus can be transferred between people who have some
symptoms. But now we know that there are people who are suffering from the disease and don’t
have any symptoms and are not even visibly sick.
During an emergency of such a pandemic, conclusions keep on changing so frequently as new information keeps on emerging and it’s normal.
But the problem is, people get sticked to the information that they came to know or heard in the beginning about that topic and that initial impression is hard to dislodge and this strengthened the fact that “Half knowledge is dangerous.
“It is a normal human tendency to keep snatching the very first bit of details that we can understand, and then it set offs a recommendation point to which we collate/determine all the other details that we can understand
later,” says a spokesperson.
“It is a normal human tendency to keep snatching the very first bit of details that we can acquire, and then it
set offs a recommendation point to which we collate/determine all the other details that we can acquire
later,” says a spokesperson.
These kinds of Psychological phenomena are considered as time saving as it will take less time and energy to make any decision based on the information one already have than it would to make decisions when u don’t have any previous previous. But this behavior becomes a problem in situations like any pandemic when what everyone is supposed to do is keep on getting all the
information that comes out on regular basis and adjust the lifestyle accordingly. If someone keep on sticking to that first set of information, there is possibility that they will be less likely to follow or understand the recommendations which will be given to them on the basis of latest findings.
In the starting months of Covid 19, for example, the experts from United States and said by the World Health Organization that people shouldn’t wear masks in their day-to-day lives. At the time, people thought that corona virus can only be passed through the people who are sick having some symptoms and come in close contact to someone. At that time some people were in favor of using the mask 24*7 but the reason behind the recommendation of major public health organizations against the masks is that
they were worried about the shortage of the masks in the market.
But after some months researchers came to know that the virus can spreads through tinier particles that lingered in the air, and that people who don’t have symptoms and are not visibly sick could also suffer from the disease and in that case, masks are important and could help reducing the chances of spread of disease. Now, the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC) says that people should wear cloth masks in public settings instead of N95 or N99 masks.
Message about unnecessity of the masks was hard to be modified as “People remember the first information they got in the beginning and do not try to explore more and updated information and they just keep in mind that masks are not mandatory to use and doesn’t let their perception get changed with other new facts,” said by a spoke person and then “It’ becomes nearly
impossible to update them with latest information.”
Another sticky kind of idea about covid was that most of the cases of COVID-19 were mild and symptoms of the disease would vanished in a week or two. As the weeks passed, though,some of the people with mild cases who didn’t require any hospitalization or quarantine started complaining that they had the symptoms for months. Celebrities and other high profile people
easily got the recognition in case they get affected with the virus but many complained that they have had difficulty in getting help or recognition/consideration from doctors because the early narration about the passing of illness is still pervasive.
People seem to stick to the piece of information that they got about the fatality rate and use that information to make all other judgement. They don’t remember the number of people who have died or have long duration of catching (but recovering) the disease. “All this gets neglected when one anchor to that visible low death rate. That low rate is a mischaracterized of
what’s actually happening,” spoke person says.
Statistics and numbers about the fatality rate are very easy to stick on, someone said. People should avoid sharing the information that they got from their knows and information gets updated regularly and can be misleading at some point of time. “Perceptions get formed when first bit of information is received,” said by a spokesperson, and it takes a lot of efforts to update
those numbers against the perception already formed.
Just knowing that sticking bias isn’t enough to stop that from happening as people have already formed the perception in their mind about that early piece of information and that will be difficult to remove. Experiments have shown that, even if u tell people that they may get sticked to some piece of information, they will still do that. “It’s a cognitive process”.
What can remove that holding of information is some psychological factors that people use to make decisions. If we receive some message from a source that we think is reliable and trustworthy, that information leads to stickiness, too. And this gets worse when we keep on hearing the same message from various trustworthy sources, that also leads to scrape away outdated information and replace it with the facts mentioned. “Most people are inclined to follow that lead,” a spokeperson said.
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