Scientific American is the essential guide to the most awe-inspiring advances in science and technology, explaining how they change our understanding of the world and shape our lives. The first step is to understand that it’s not just about exhaustion or tiredness or depleting a mental resource
The U.S. has tragically surpassed 400,000 COVID-19 deaths, and case numbers and hospitalizations are likewise spiking to record levels around the world. With vaccines now rolling out out, there is reason to hope that there is an end in sight. However, by most estimates, widespread vaccinations will not be in place until the middle of the year at the earliest. So, we have some ways to go yet with social distancing, mask wearing and other pandemic mitigation behaviors. It is worrying, therefore, that the world is witnessing a consistent decline in compliance with these mitigation behaviors over time. For example, a Gallup poll from the fall that tracked social distancing habits among Americans found that the percentage of respondents avoiding small gatherings declined by 40 points since April, while those avoiding public places declined by 25 points. Public health experts term this phenomenon “pandemic fatigue” and cite it as a contributor to the increase in incidence rates being witnessed here and in Europe. Understanding pandemic fatigue is challenging because pandemic fatigue is not one phenomenon and likely stems from several causes. Some of these include political and social trends, such as changes in libertarian attitudes or diminishing trust in scientific authorities. However, pandemic fatigue also occurs for people who are ostensibly on board with societal attempts to control spread of the virus. So, why would compliance with public health advice decline in these people? Despite its name, pandemic fatigue in these cases is not really about exhaustion or tiredness or depleting a mental resource. Rather, pandemic fatigue should be understood in terms of motivation for the tasks we choose to do. As such, lessons from the psychology and neuroscience of cognitive control may be informative. Humans have a remarkable capacity to conceive of a task they have never done before and plan and execute the actions needed to do it. For example, most of us probably didn’t have a routine of wearing a mask around other people before this year. But, once we understood that it stemmed the spread of COVID-19, many of us started doing so. It didn’t take hundreds of trials of training to learn this behavior, or indeed, thousands of years of evolution. Rather, we incorporated mask wearing into our daily lives almost immediately. Humans can link our abstract goals, ideas, rules and knowledge to our behavior at a speed and on a scale that no other species can match and no AI yet built can emulate.
