How worried are you that someone close to you will contract COVID-19?
Does reading the news or talking (from a distance) with your friends inflate your sense of worry? Or are you playing it cool to keep those around you calm?
We used an indirect form of survey questioning called a List Experiment to calculate the likelihood that Americans are hiding from public view their personal, deep-down fear of someone close to them contracting COVID-19.
Americans are twice as likely to publicly say they are worried about someone they know contracting COVID-19 than they privately, truly, feel.
That’s right. 66% of Americans publicly state they are worried. But when you ask them through an experimental condition where their privacy is guaranteed, only 33% reveal they are actually worried.
