Willingness to comply with social distance relies on working memory
Decision-making processes are easier for people with higher working memory capacity, potentially leading to an increased willingness to comply with social distancing.
By CELIA JEANSOCIAL DISTANCING, but what to do at home?(photo credit: REUTERS)
As the coronavirus crisis continues to take its toll on the world, and tens of thousands of people become infected with it each day, a crucial tool in protection against morbidity is social distancing.While the act is one of the paramount preventative measures someone can take, researchers have found that someone's willingness to comply with social distancing depends mainly on the strength of their working memory.People with a higher working memory capacity can comprehend better the benefits and consequences of their decisions. This leads to the willingness to comply with social distancing measures and preventive regulations, due in part to increased ability to be able to weigh costs and benefits, according to a study published on July 28 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.Working memory, a factor in the decision-making process in brain, is the mental process of retaining information for a small period of time - generally just seconds. The capacity of information that someone's working memory can hold is indicative of many mental traits, such as intelligence, comprehension and learning, according to the University of California, Riverside, at which the senior author on the paper written on the study, Weiwei Zhang, is an associate professor of pyschology.Researchers found that individuals with higher working memory capacity have an increased awareness of benefits over costs of social distancing and, subsequently, show more compliance with recommended social distancing guidelines provided during the initial outbreak of the coronavirus, according to study coauthored by Weizhen Xie, Stephen Campbell, and Zhang, an associate professor of psychology at the university.“The higher the working memory capacity, the more likely that social distancing behaviors will follow,” said Zhang. “Interestingly, this relationship holds even after we statistically control for relevant psychological and socioeconomic factors such as depressed and anxious moods, personality traits, education, intelligence, and income," he added.Findings from the study show that "social distancing compliance may rely on an effortful decision process of evaluating the costs versus benefits of these behaviors in working memory — instead of, say, mere habit," Zhang said.This leads to the understanding that decision-making processes are easier for people with higher working memory capacity, potentially leading to an increased willingness to comply with social distancing.The study followed 850 US residents from March 13 to March 25, 2020, the formative weeks of the outbreak in the United States.Participants were first asked to fill out a demographic survey before being made to fill out a more comprehensive survey that measured individual tendencies towards social distancing compliance. Topics covered everything from mood tendencies such as depression and anxiety, to personality variables such as intelligence and the ability to comprehend weighing the costs and benefits of social distancing.
“Individual differences in working memory capacity can predict social distancing compliance just as well as some social factors such as personality traits,” Zhang said.The study’s findings suggest that learning social distancing requires a decision-making process requiring effort that relies on working memory as social distancing is not a habitual tendency. Zhang recommends that people "deliberately make the effort to overcome our tendency to avoid effortful decisions, such as to not practice social distancing."
