People wrongly believe their friends will protect them from Covid

“And then we went down the rabbit hole,” De Vries added.

It’s what they call the “friend shield effect.”

“The idea was that we perceive our friends like a shield. We feel safe when Covid-19 is associated with friendship,” De Vries said — even if we shouldn’t.

The first experiment involved junk food. The professors divided up participants into two groups. One was asked to think about a close friend. The other group was asked to think about a distant acquaintance. Both wrote down memories of those people. Then they were given an article that argued eating unhealthy snacks could increase a person’s risk to develop severe Covid. The article also mentioned that hand sanitizers and masks were protective.

The groups were then allowed to shop online from a store that offered travel-size hand sanitizer and masks and Cheez-Its and king-size Twix bars and Mars bars. The group that thought about their close friends first were much more likely to buy junk food than protective items, despite the warnings.

A second experiment divided participants into three groups. None had ever had Covid. They then were told to imagine that they had been infected by a friend, an acquaintance or a stranger. Then they were asked how much they would spend on health protection in the next couple of months. Those who imagined they got sick from strangers or people that they weren’t close to planned to buy about the same amount. Those who got sick from friends planned to spend half as much. The experiment confirmed that “positive emotions can make people relatively oblivious to risks and likely engage in risky behavior,” the study said.

A third experiment involved people who had Covid-19 at one point in the pandemic and knew how they got sick after being exposed to Covid. Those who were exposed by a friend or family member were much less likely to think that they’d get it again when compared to those who got sick after exposure by an acquaintance or stranger.

The fifth experiment looked at people’s friendships and factored in political ideology. Earlier research has shown that politically conservative people draw sharper distinctions between who is a friend and who is an acquaintance.

In that experiment, people were asked to imagine going to a favorite coffee shop by themselves, with a close friend or an acquaintance. They were asked how crowded they thought the coffee shop would be and how likely they thought they’d get sick after being exposed to someone there. They were also asked how they would describe themselves politically. Conservatives thought the coffee shop would be less crowded and they’d be less likely to get sick if they were going with a friend rather than if they were going with an acquaintance.

“The people who had the clearest boundaries of who is a close friend and who they are distant from show the greatest friend shield effect and feel more invulnerable to Covid,” De Vries said.

In total, these studies repeatedly seem to show that people just aren’t good at perceiving risks when friends are involved, even if the risk was beyond this person in their social circle. This is what the study called an “irrational potentially dangerous bias,” since limited…