Research pick: Project fear - "How can fear impact economic decisions in pandemic contexts at the light of decision-making systems? An approach to the COVID-19 case"

Fear, driven partly by media misinformation, is an important emotion in the context of crises. It can lead to bad, or, at best, suboptimal, decisions, especially in the midst of a global pandemic, according to work published in the International Journal of Business and Systems Research.

José Chavaglia Neto of the Beta L Consulting Group in São Paulo, António Bento Caleiro of the Universidade de Evora, in Evora, Brazil, José António Filipe of the Iscte – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, Manuel Pacheco Coelho of the University of Lisbon, Portugal, and Gholamreza Askari of Semnan University in Semnan, Iran, have looked at how fear emerged in Brazil during the still-ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. A pandemic that led to serious health problems and death and economic devastation irrespective of how fearful anyone felt when the virus emerged and in the ensuing months following the World Health Organisation’s announcements regarding the pandemic.

During the early stages of the crises many people were overwhelmed with information, much of it conflicting, by nature of the very novelty of the causative agent, the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, and its effects. As the days and weeks and months went by, disinformation was thrown into the mix and conspiracy theories emerged. A clear picture of how events were truly unfolding was difficult to unravel. This was especially true in terms of the information shared in totalitarian regimes and spreading from there and even more so once we had pharmaceutical interventions and different vaccine responses to COVID-19.

The picture was even muddier given social isolation, lockdowns, quarantining and the closure of international borders all of which was done with the aim of reducing the rate of spread of the disease, the morbidity associated with it, and the mortality rates and so-called “excess” deaths. Nothing is yet particularly clear for many people even more than two years since the declaration of the pandemic, and many people lived in fear from the start and many still do.

Neto, J.C., Caleiro, A.B., Filipe, J.A., Coelho, M.P. and Askari, G. (2022) ‘How can fear impact economic decisions in pandemic contexts at the light of decision-making systems? An approach to the COVID-19 case’, Int. J. Business and Systems Research, Vol. 16, Nos. 5/6, pp.759–782.