Despite pandemic fears, New Zealanders should remain open-minded about considering different, evidence-based ways of containing Covid-19, a researcher says.
A collaborative study led by the University of Otago has shown Covid-19 containment and elimination efforts have become "moralised". As a result, people were more likely to accept collateral damage from these efforts, such as social shaming, lost lives and illnesses, it said.
This moralisation was so strong people reacted negatively even when Covid-19 restrictions were merely questioned, lead author Maja Graso said this week.
"We need to be open-minded," Dr Graso said.
"There’s a great danger of confirmation bias," Dr Graso, who is a senior lecturer in business ethics at the Otago department of management, said.
Published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, the study examined how likely people were to overlook the harmful by-products of the elimination response, compared with similar actions unrelated to Covid-19 such as reducing road deaths.
Dr Graso said the results supported the hypothesis, suggesting Covid-19 elimination efforts had become "moralised to an almost sacred level".
Prioritising control or elimination of Covid-19 also carried collateral human costs, such as unemployment, extreme financial stress, social isolation, substance abuse and delayed cancer diagnoses.
The researchers gave New Zealand community participants one of two parallel lay-oriented research proposal descriptions.
Although both proposals relied on the same research and presented the same information about the methods, the proposal questioning New Zealand’s elimination approach — rather the proposal which supported that approach — was rated as having less rigorous methods and relying on less accurate information, she said.
