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Coronavirus Disease 2019
Why You Need to Keep Social Distancing While Connected
Practice social distancing to protect others, not just yourself.
Posted April 9, 2020
In my previous post, I wrote about Why You Need to Stay Connected While Social Distancing. In this post, I’m writing about why you need to maintain the social distancing. The primary reason to stay at home, keep your distance, wear a medical mask in public, wash your hands and use hand sanitizer is not to protect yourself. The primary reason is to protect other people.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the lead members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, has reported that as many as 50% of those infected with coronavirus may be showing no symptoms. They may have no idea that they are infected. They are probably still worried about getting infected. And they might not be worried about infecting others—even though they clearly can.
If you’ve been out in public recently, you could be one of those asymptomatically infected people right now. This poses for you a dilemma. One that looks a bit like what Game Theorists call the “prisoner’s dilemma.” If you cooperate with the social distancing, mask-wearing, etc., and the people around you do the same, then you will all be slightly inconvenienced, but your odds of surviving coronavirus will be greatly improved. By contrast, if you choose not to cooperate (game theorists call that “defecting”), then you can save yourself the inconvenience of staying at home and wearing a mask, but you might be risking infecting the people with whom you come into contact. In this coronavirus version of the prisoner’s dilemma, cooperating is choosing community over self. Defecting is choosing self over community.
You have the right to be cavalier about your own odds of getting COVID-19 and surviving it. It’s your body. But you don’t have the right to be cavalier about someone else’s odds of getting it from you, and then potentially dying. Therefore, not social distancing and not wearing a face-covering in public is a lot like defecting in the prisoner’s dilemma. It’s definitely not cooperating.
In 1973, John Platt referred to this bad habit of people choosing not to cooperate, in part because they don’t trust other people to also cooperate, as a “social trap.” If a cooperator falls into that trap, then they can become a defector not so much because they’re selfish but because they don’t trust other people to be similarly cooperative. In fact, in computer simulations of thousands of agents cooperating and defecting, it is frighteningly easy for every agent in the simulation to become a defector just because they once got defected-on and now they don’t trust anyone to cooperate fairly with them in the future (Vanderschraaf, 2006).
Complexity scientist Paul Smaldino has shown in these simulations that when resources are scarce, defectors reign supreme early on, and cooperators die out in droves. But as bounded communities of cooperators stick together over time, those pockets of survivors can create wealth, rather than merely take wealth. And the lone defectors eventually run out of lone cooperators to dupe, after which they prey on each other until they’re extinct (Smaldino et al., 2013). Probably the best strategy for the prisoner’s dilemma is tit-for-tat with occasional forgiveness. That is, keep track of who defected on you last time, and don’t cooperate with them in the future—but once in a while cooperate with a defector just in case they might change their ways.
When it comes to this coronavirus version of the prisoner’s dilemma, everyone cooperating with social distancing will “flatten the curve” substantially, making it so that a huge spike in cases doesn’t overwhelm hospital resources. You don’t want to be one of the COVID-19 cases that needs a ventilator but can’t get one. In fact, Paul Smaldino has posted an easy-to-understand simulation of exactly how social distancing will flatten that curve.
The United States has served as a perfect proving grounds of how cooperation with social distancing works. Some states have been imposing shelter-in-place for some time now, while others have barely started. California, in particular, has posed as a model example of government-mandated social distancing and sheltering in place. A stay-at-home order was issued by its governor early on, and schools and non-essential businesses were closed long before the death toll began to climb at all. The results of flattening the curve have been remarkable.
The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics & Evaluation has an interactive website that shows projections for each state in the U.S., as well as for some other countries. At the end of March, the coronavirus simulations from that website were predicting a total of about 5,000 deaths in California alone by the end of May. However, at the beginning of April, a bolus of new data has updated those simulations so that they now predict about 1,600 deaths in California by the end of May. The social distancing is working. By contrast, other states such as Florida have been model examples of what not to do. Due in part to Florida’s very late decision to impose a stay-at-home order, they are currently projected to lose well over 4,000 lives by the end of May. Cognitive scientist Jordan Ackerman recently posted an animation of the timeline of how states imposed those stay-at-home orders. Some states are cooperating with this social distancing mindset and some aren't.
Social distancing works, in all its various forms. And we can all use it cooperatively to win in this coronavirus dilemma. If you absolutely have to go out in public, don’t be a defector; be a cooperator. Wear a medical mask. Maintain more than a 6-foot distance from anyone else. Use gloves, disinfecting wipes, and hand sanitizer. Do it for others, not just for yourself. And if you don’t absolutely have to go out in public, then don’t. That’s cooperating, too.
