On COVID-19, cognitive bias, and open access
May R. Berenbaum
PNAS January 12, 2021 118 (2) e2026319118
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Figure: Coronavirus illustration. Image credit: Shutterstock/Lightspring.
Starting out the year 2021 by looking back at the year 2020 might seem like an exercise in masochism, given the horrific loss of life, the untold economic hardships, the resurgence of white supremacy across the country, and the rampant (and at times utterly incomprehensible) political chaos packed into those 12 months. There were, however, many redeeming aspects of the year, not least of which was a panoply of breathtaking scientific achievements. The development of not just one but several remarkably effective vaccines against COVID-19, a hitherto completely unknown virus, in less than 12 months was unprecedented (and was among the reasons Oxford Languages chose “unprecedented” as one of its choices for “word of the year,” https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/). But even beyond assembling, with astonishing rapidity, the body of knowledge required for successful vaccine development, the scientific community across a broad span of disciplines continued to discover and innovate with inspiring resilience. Like so many other journals, PNAS experienced a surge in manuscript submissions—an increase of about 20% for the year, in fact, resulting in the publication of more than 3,600 research articles this year, compared with ∼3,250 last year.
As open access publication becomes the norm across the publishing landscape, making data more accessible while at the same time anticipating and making a greater effort to correct potential cognitive biases may be among many tools that the scientific community can use to reduce the likelihood of misperceptions that can lead to widespread rejection of policies and recommendations based on solid scientific evidence, a cultural phenomenon that appears to have grown as exponentially as COVID-19 in the United States in 2020. As 2021 begins with uncertainties about what percentage of the population will actually be willing to receive those “unprecedented” vaccines, it’s probably worth thinking about ways to help the general public contextualize and interpret the data that can be freely accessed.
Finally, speaking of contextualizing, although populations of organisms may have the potential for exponential growth, in reality, density-dependent mortality factors generally prevent any from actually doing so for any length of time. Thus, we’re not really in imminent danger of being buried by elephants. And, speaking of time, if you were wondering, Hardin (15) estimated that it would take 1,484 years for Earth’s surface to be entirely covered by the offspring of just one pair of elephants.
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