Dr. Shusaku Sasaki, Specially Appointed Associate Professor, Center for Infectious Disease Education and Research (CiDER)
"Taking a step back to move forward: Understanding the root of others’ actions key to cooperation during pandemic"
The COVID-19 pandemic has required the various members of our society to engage in forms of cooperation unprecedented in both scale and strategy.
During the pandemic, we have all taken actions to protect ourselves and those close to us. But it goes beyond protecting individuals: I believe that we have been cooperating with each other in any way we can in order to protect our society as a whole. I have been working on the mechanisms of cooperative behavior and ways to encourage such behaviors in the field of behavioral economics. This includes an altruistic aspect, in which people are asked to sacrifice a little bit of their own benefits in order to help society and act in ways that benefit others.
My research on cooperative behaviors involving COVID-19 vaccination has two perspectives. The first of these perspectives is about how to encourage people to voluntarily receive the vaccine with uncertainty[1]. Although there have been previous economic studies on vaccinations, many of the studies have been conducted under the assumption that the vaccines in question are effective in preventing infection. What was very different this time around was that our society had to accept vaccination while scientific evidence continued to accumulate and update information on the vaccine. In fact, COVID-19 vaccines were completely new. At the stage of vaccine approval, vaccine efficacy in preventing disease onset were clarified through randomized trials in experimental settings. After being approved, the vaccine efficacy/effectiveness in preventing infection and severe disease were then checked through investigations using field data. However, the emergence of mutant strains has changed the type and degree of efficacy/effectiveness. Because of this, ordinary people felt it as if they were being told to receive a vaccine while not entirely sure if it would be effective or even really knowing the side effects for each person. Needless to say, it’s not that easy to get people to agree to such a thing. When research is ongoing to reveal that which is still uncertain, what kind of communication is necessary in order to still be able to recommend vaccinations? From our surveys and experiments, we have gained insight into effective and acceptable ways to phrase these recommendations, finding that instead of forcing individuals to receive the vaccine, encouraging people to understand the social value of their vaccinations and to take it on their own made them feel positive about it without increasing psychological burden. Although we were able to deliver the suggestions from our research to the central government and local municipalities, the reality was that they were in a very dire situation in terms of vaccine supply and infrastructure development. I hope that in the future, if we are ever faced with a similar event, we can contribute through our research.
The other perspective of my research related to how we can care for each other when both vaccinated and non-vaccinated people are living together in society[2]. It was a column on the web that triggered me to think about the cold attitude of those who had been vaccinated. It was a story about a person, one who could not get vaccinated due to specific circumstances, and how they were saddened at their workplace by the cold attitude of their colleagues who had been vaccinated. We then conducted an experiment in which we paired up two people and asked them how they would share money with the other. The results showed that those who had been vaccinated would divide the money generously with another who had also been vaccinated, but would discriminate against those who had not. On the other hand, we found that individuals who were not vaccinated acted generously and did not necessarily antagonize those who were vaccinated. These results raised the question of whether those who had been vaccinated should reconsider their thinking and attitudes toward those who were not. Since vaccinated and non-vaccinated people do not need to antagonize each other in a society in which everyone wishes to end the pandemic, I think it is necessary to spur action in which vaccinated people, who are the majority in many developed countries, should be encouraged to look at the reasons and circumstances of non-vaccinated people, who are the minority.
Vaccination has been thought to be one way in which people have taken cooperative action to end the pandemic. However, we found that those cooperative vaccinated individuals can be uncooperative and even discriminatory toward those who have not been vaccinated. For that matter, we don’t even know how much actual difference there is between those who have been vaccinated and those who have not, since the new vaccines' effectiveness in preventing infection of this emerging and uncertain disease has been limited and even fluctuating. Still, discriminatory attitudes can be quite persistent. If we focus on only one aspect of people’s behaviors like this, we begin to see differences, and these differences can divide us. Vaccination behavior was one of the keys for us to fight against the pandemic. But I don't think we have to cooperate in vaccination at all costs. I think it is important for us to be flexible in choosing cooperative actions for society and others, adapting how we take action to a variety of situations in our lives. Human behavior is multifaceted and very complex. Such non-medical phenomena cannot be revealed from medical research alone. I believe this is the significance of my involvement as a behavioral economist, one of the social scientists.
As society returns to normalcy…
Are you and those around you still wearing masks? In Japan, we see people wearing masks even now that we are free to remove them. It seems that it is difficult to revert our behavior once it has changed, to stop doing things even after they stop being useful.
In many countries, the government has implemented forceful measures such as simultaneous lockdowns under its control. In Japan, on the other hand, the government and local governments delivered requests with soft messages, something along the lines of, "You decide what kind of action you want to take.” I initially felt that it was better that Japan respected the autonomy of its residents, but now I am not so sure. When I see people who are unwilling to take off their masks, I often wonder if it has become more difficult for them to take them off than it would have been with a more forceful approach, perhaps because calling to people’s autonomy has changed their values along with their behavior. Is some kind of forced form of change easier to undo because their values have not changed? I would like to think through which approach is better when considering social and individuals’ benefits and costs of each.
What would a "future society where life shines brightly" look like for you?
I think life will shine brightly if we can create a society where we can look at the actions of others and give attention to the reasons and circumstances behind those actions/inactions. Rather than reacting instantly to what we see or experience, we should try to take a deeper look into the reasons why, and once we are able to do this, I think we can build a society in which we can comfortably cooperate with a diverse range of individuals.
[1] Shusaku Sasaki, Tomoya Saito, Fumio Ohtake (2022). Nudges for COVID-19 voluntary vaccination: How to explain peer information? Social Science & Medicine
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.114561
[2] Shusaku Sasaki, Hirofumi Kurokawa (2022). Vaccination and Discrimination: Experimental Evidence under the COVID-19 Pandemic, Osaka University CiDER
Discussion Paper, No.001, October 2022.
https://www.cider.osaka-u.ac.jp/dp/pdf/CiDER-dp001.pdf
For more information.
https://www.cider.osaka-u.ac.jp/en/researchers/sasaki_s.html
https://ssasaki.weebly.com
https://researchmap.jp/ssasaki_econ?lang=en
Text: Mayumi Mochizuki/Edit: Christopher Bubb