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, intensive care unit admission and death due to COVID-19. As of February 2021, over 81% of COVID-19-related deaths in the US occurred in people over the age of 65 (refs. 1,2). 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 outcomes3,4. Therefore, effectively communicating health-related risk information requires tailoring interventions to the needs of older adults5. Using a new informational intervention with a nationally representative sample of 546 US 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 suggest new strategies to combat annual influenza outbreaks. A cognitive intervention study for communicating information about COVID-19 transmission risk found that older adults tended to forget numerical information but reported increased perceived risk after imagining a personalized scenario with social consequences.