How did we assess the risk of becoming infected at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic? And how much trust did we have in science and politics back then? If we think back to the time around three years ago, our memories may have been influenced by our current attitudes. A study shows that vaccinated people overestimate their risk assessment at the time, while unvaccinated people underestimate it. This effect was stronger the more a person identified with their vaccination status. According to the research team, the distorted memory also contributes to social polarization.
In May 2023, the World Health Organization (WHO) lifted the global coronavirus health emergency. Many countries around the world are now dedicating themselves to evaluating and coming to terms with the pandemic period. Which measures have proven to be effective and which ones might not have been necessary from today's perspective? How has the pandemic affected society? And what conclusions can be drawn for possible future pandemics? What is also important is the social memory and assessment of the pandemic period, because this not only influences today's trust in politics and science, but also future behavior in similar situations.
Comparison of then and now
But are our memories accurate? A team led by Philipp Sprengholz from the University of Bamberg has now looked into this in a cross-border study. Already in 2020, in the first year of the pandemic, the team surveyed thousands of people from Germany and Austria about how they assess their personal risk of infection, which protective measures they adhere to and to what extent they trust the government and science. The second survey took place at the turn of the year 2022/2023. “In the second survey, they were also asked to remember their perceptions and behavior in the first year of the pandemic,” explains Sprengholz. “So we were able to compare their memories with the answers they actually gave.”
The researchers also recorded whether the respondents had been vaccinated and how much they identified with their vaccination status. To do this, the test subjects should, for example, indicate whether they are “proud” of being vaccinated or unvaccinated and whether they feel they belong to the vaccinated or unvaccinated group. In addition to the surveys from Germany and Austria, the researchers included studies with a total of over 10,000 respondents from a total of eleven countries, including Great Britain, Sweden, Italy, Japan, Australia, Mexico and the USA.
Past settings reinterpreted
The result: “The memories were distorted in both vaccinated and unvaccinated people, but in opposite directions,” the team reports. Vaccinated people overestimated their risk assessment at the time and their trust in science, while unvaccinated people underestimated these factors. This effect was stronger the more the respondents identified with their vaccination status. “The results show that there are systematic differences in how people remember the pandemic, even though their assessments at the time often didn’t differ that much,” says co-author Luca Henkel from the University of Chicago.
In order to find out to what extent the memory distortion is motivated by motivation, the researchers in two studies offered their test subjects a financial reward if their answers matched particularly well with those three years earlier. In at least one of these studies, the answers were actually closer to the original assessments that the test subjects had expressed in the first year of the pandemic. “This suggests that the distortions are at least partially influenced motivationally by the attitude towards vaccination and cannot be explained solely by forgetting,” the researchers conclude.
Interplay between memory and current settings
The studies also showed that people who underestimated their risk perception and their trust in government and science at the time, retrospectively perceived the measures as less appropriate. In addition, these people were more likely to support that those responsible in science and politics should be punished or that the political system should be dismantled. They also stated that they did not want to comply with the measures in force in the event of possible future pandemics.
The researchers found country-specific differences: While in Sweden only 19 percent of those surveyed called for punishments for those politically responsible, in Mexico (49 percent) and Great Britain (48 percent) almost half of those surveyed did so. Germany was in the middle field with 29 percent. “However, our samples were not designed to determine differences between countries,” write the researchers.
They want to shed more light on this aspect in future studies. They also want to find out whether similar memory distortions can also be found in other contexts, for example in attitudes towards climate change. “We also want to research ways to reduce polarization,” says co-author Robert Böhm from the University of Vienna. “It may be possible to reduce the identification of vaccinated and unvaccinated people with their vaccination status. This could reduce the motivation to distort memories in the first place and thus improve the processing of the pandemic.”
Source: Philipp Sprengholz (University of Bamberg) et al., Nature, doi: 10.1038/s41586-023-06674-5