The Results of the World’s Largest-Ever Psych Experiment Are In

Pretty much every behavioral science experiment ever conducted, whether on animals or humans carries with it a probability—not a certainty—that the results are valid. You will usually see, somewhere in the results section of publications describing the study the notation p<.05 or p<.01, signifying that the obtained results are true for an entire population of pigeons, rats, monkeys, humans, or all of the above with less than either a 5% or 1% probability (p) respectively that the results occurred due to random chance, not the manipulations that the experimenters applied to test subjects in the experimental vs. control group.

Asserting probabilities vs. certainties is necessary because running experiments on entire populations—say of 7.8 billion humans or an even greater number of the global population of rats—is impossible, so statistical inference from far smaller populations has always been necessary, producing the 1% or 5% margins of error.

Impossible, that is, until now.

2020 subjected the entire human population to several experimental manipulations, and, with the year over, the results of those experiments are now in. So, here, paying homage to the standard introduction, methods, results, discussion format of science papers is a description of those experiments, whose margin for error is exactly zero.

Methods

A highly contagious (R0 >1) [1], sometimes lethal pathogen was introduced into a dense population center at the beginning of the trial period, and resulting effects on both individual and group attitude and behavior measured. Manipulations were applied to experimental groups with no manipulation applied to control groups, employing a between-groups design (one group subjected to experimental measure, one group not subjected). Conditions in test and control populations were as follows:

Experimental treatment group: Strong public policy and pathogen control measures including rigorously enforced, prolonged forced lockdowns, mandatory mask-wearing, mandatory controlled quarantine, and forceful, science-based public health messaging emphasizing the need for drastic changes in behavior to control pathogen spread.

Control group: Weak public policy, including voluntary or absent pathogen control measures, weak or absent enforcement, accompanied by sporadic, inconsistent, or contradictory public health messages and/or random news reports depicting overcrowded ICU’s, exhausted health care workers, and peaks in infection rates

Dependent variables measured were:

• Beliefs and attitudes in target groups regarding reality of pathogen’s existence and need for behavior modification as evidenced by self-report and social media posts.
• Compliance with behavioral modifications espoused in public health messages as evidenced by mobile-device tracking data indicating the presence or absence of social distancing.
• Pathogen mortality rate expressed in deaths/million of population.

Results

Beliefs and attitudes: The treatment groups (e.g. China, New Zealand, South Korea) receiving strong, consistent public policy and health messaging together with consonant, strongly enforced, mandated pathogen control measures, exhibited near-universal belief in both the seriousness of the pathogen and the need for government-mandated control measures. Beliefs and attitudes in the control group were far more heterogenous, with 50% or greater of the control population expressing strong doubt in the very existence of the pathogen and/or need for aggressive pathogen control measures.

Compliance with public health guidelines—as measured by cellphone proximity tracking data, self-report, and other measures—was greater than 90% in treatment populations, and estimated to be less than 30% across the entire study period (2020) in control populations [2], although control populations sporadically exhibited strong compliance in the early (Mach/April) interval of the study period.

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Pathogen mortality rate per capita deaths per million: treatment group (e.g. China): 3.4 deaths/million [3] Control group (e.g. USA ) 921 deaths/million [3]

Discussion

As compared with the control group, the treatment group showed concomitant beliefs in the seriousness of the pathogen, need for strict measures, compliance with guidelines, and low mortality, suggesting that the treatment conditions were an effective means of controlling the pathogen through modification of attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.

Possible confounding variables that could cast doubt on this conclusion are the influence on behavior of political and cultural differences responding to authority. That is, the cultural/political acceptance of the population of authoritarian measures and perceived threat of coercion, rather than the treatment itself, might have caused lower infections, for example, in Asian autocracies vs. Western-style democracies. However, these confounding variables can be ruled out by examination of public attitudes, compliance, and mortality rates in western-style democracies such as New Zealand (5.1 deaths per million) and South Korea (18.2 deaths/million). [3]

Thus, the results of the experiment support the conclusion that public policy-engendered attitudes, beliefs —and behaviors driven by those beliefs —were the primary determinants of mortality in the experiment. It is also possible that the principle of cognitive dissonance (personal beliefs were driven by personal behavior in the experimental and control groups vs the other way around) can explain all or part of the results.

Prior research by Kahneman et al, [4] Roepick [5] and others, suggesting that human perceptions and beliefs in the control population arose not from assessment of facts, logic and objective probabilities, but from hardwired and acquired cognitive biases that greatly simplify decision-making while maintaining positive affective states (feeling safe and comfortable when faced with uncertainty and helplessness) has been validated.

More important, the prior work of Kahneman, Tversky, and others demonstrating cognitive biases and endemic errors in human judgment have now, based upon extremely high (>7.8 billion) sample size, been unequivocally extended to roughly half the entire human population, if not more.

Future Research

None required. For the first time in the history of science, absolute certainty of experimental findings has been achieved.