Imagining a Personalized Scenario Selectively Increases Perceived Risk of Viral Transmission for Older Adults

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a serious and prolonged public-health emergency. Older adults have been at substantially greater risk of hospitalization, ICU admission, and death due to COVID-19; as of February 2021, over 81% of COVID-19-related deaths in the U.S. occurred for people over the age of 65. Converging evidence from around the world suggests that age is the greatest risk factor for severe COVID-19 illness and for the experience of adverse health outcomes. Therefore, effectively communicating health-related risk information requires tailoring interventions to older adults' needs. Using a novel informational intervention with a nationally-representative sample of 546 U.S. residents, we found that older adults reported increased perceived risk of COVID-19 transmission after imagining a personalized scenario with social consequences. Although older adults tended to forget numerical information over time, the personalized simulations elicited increases in perceived risk that persisted over a 1-3 week delay. Overall, our results bear broad implications for communicating information about health risks to older adults, and they suggest new strategies to combat annual influenza outbreaks.