A Nudge Will Be Good for the Vaccine Passport

TWO BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS EXPERIMENTS SHOW THAT TO AVOID THE POLARIZATION OF PUBLIC OPINION IN FAVOR OF OR AGAINST THE COVID DIGITAL CERTIFICATE (AS HAPPENED FOR EXAMPLE WITH THE OPPOSITION TO THE APP FOR TRACKING) IT IS GOOD TO COMBINE TWO INFORMATION STRATEGIES. THE FIRST IS TO REDUCE THE BIAS OF THE STATUS QUO, THE SECOND IS TO INTRODUCE THE PEER EFFECT

Every measure the government took to fight the COVID-19 pandemic was met with hostility by a part of the population. Mandatory mask orders, stay-home-policies, non-essential business closure all encountered fierce opposition. In some instances, the lack of support among the general public completely undermined government efforts. Contact Tracing Apps are a case in point: presented as a key tool to keep the spread of COVID-19 under control, they never gained the trust of the public and are now almost unanimously recognized as a failure.
 
Vaccine passports are the latest hotly debated and highly polarizing measure to combat COVID-19. For example, the European Commission has reached an agreement on the “Digital COVID Certificate”, which will provide proof that a person has been vaccinated against COVID-19, received a negative test result, or recently recovered from COVID-19. Moreover, some countries like Israel and Chile went as far as requiring proof of immunization to take part in daily life activities like attending shows or even circulating freely during general lockdowns. But can citizens as a whole be persuaded that vaccine passports are important to preserve public health while reopening the economies and restarting large scale international traveling?
 
The answer to this question is especially important because unpopular and polarizing vaccine passports might cause a backlash and increase vaccine hesitancy if they are implemented without the support of the general public, and especially of those segments of the population that have less trust in vaccines.
 
To this day, institutional communication has largely relied on a narrative that flagged factors like the importance of vaccine passport, the fact that they are free, and that they protect the privacy of the users--a rhetoric that closely and disconcertingly resembles the one used for contact tracing apps.
 
We carried out two experiments to show that behavioral economics can provide useful guidance on how to frame communication in order to increase support for vaccine passports, to depolarize them and to minimize the risk that they trigger vaccine hesitancy.
In the first experiment, we leverage the fact that vaccine passports are not, in fact, unprecedented. Therefore, we apply the well-known status quo bias, that is, the tendency of people to accept a situation when it is framed as being the status quo rather than as a change. The World Health Organization has long endorsed certificates confirming vaccination against yellow fever for entry into certain countries. Similarly, both conservative (Notre Dame University) and liberal (Yale University) institutions require proof of vaccination from their employees and people who want to use their services We show that informing respondents about this simple fact greatly increases the support for vaccine passes among both Republicans and Democrats, without increasing vaccine hesitancy. As importantly, we show that this is an effective strategy to depolarize the debate around vaccine passports, as it reduces the distance between the views of Democrats and those of Republicans.
 
In the second experiment, we moved from the observation that for highly debated issues people are unlikely to be exposed to only one nudge. Therefore, we attempted to address an issue that is gaining momentum in the academic literature: what happens if respondents are exposed more than one nudge at once? Does one nudge crowd out the effects of the other(s)? To this end, we tested the impact of using two nudges: i) the status quo bias that we used in the first experiment, and ii) the peer effect. In particular, the second nudge consisted in informing respondents about the percentage of people that currently oppose the introduction of a vaccine passport. We observe that both nudges are effective in increasing the support for the pass and they do not fuel vaccine hesitancy. Intriguingly, we observe that their combined impact is even stronger, which suggests that policymakers can and should rely on both nudges simultaneously.
 
 

by Alessandro Romano, Assistant Professor at Department of Legal Studies