Coexisting with COVID-19: COVID-19 and Risk

Every day, COVID-19 requires us to weigh the risks we are willing to take to maintain a sense of normalcy. Should you wear a mask or not? Is heading out to get a pedicure an ‘essential’ trip? Ready to sit in a restaurant for your anniversary? Or maybe you just want to stay home, hide under the covers and wait until this is all over. This week we’ll talk with experts who can help us better understand decision making in these uncertain times. Featuring moderator Hanson Hosein and faculty guests Linda Ko, Susan Joslyn and Nidhi Agrawal.

About this week’s guests:

Linda Ko, Director, Health Communication Research Center, Fred Hutch

Linda Ko is a behavioral scientist with expertise in health communication strategies to promote behavior change. Her research aims to understand community’s behavior within the socio-cultural context, develop interventions for those behaviors and disseminate knowledge through community-based participatory research. Dr. Ko received a PhD degree from the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health. She is an Associate Professor at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, an Associate Professor at the University of Washington, an Adjunct Associate Professor in Family Medicine, and the Co-Director of the community engagement program at the University of Washington Institute of Translational Health Sciences (Clinical and Translational Science Award).

Susan Joslyn, Principle Investigator, Decision Making with Uncertainty Lab, UW Department of Psychology

Susan Joslyn is an Associate Professor of Psychology at University of Washington. She is a cognitive psychologist whose research is on decisions under uncertainty, such as those involving severe weather, climate change and medical issues. Her highly interdisciplinary research makes important theoretical contributions to the psychology of decision making as well as having implications for best practices in uncertainty communication techniques in several domains.

Nidhi Agrawal, Michael G. Foster Professor of Marketing and International Business, Foster School of Business

Nidhi Agrawal is the Michael G. Foster Professor of Marketing and International Business at the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her current research is motivated by the question: how can consumer psychology inform the marketing of behaviors, products and services aimed to promote physical, psychological, social, and financial well-being? Bringing a consumer perspective to identify the psychological processes that underlie self-control and health behaviors, Agrawal’s research focuses on how perception, emotions, and goals together shape consumer information processing to influence risk perception, attitudes, and behaviors. In the domain of emotions, she examines how emotions such as shame or fear related to health messaging can shape consumer decision-making. Agrawal is the recipient of the Association for Consumer Research’s Early Career Research Award (2014) and the American Marketing Association’s Erin Anderson Award for Emerging Marketing Scholar and Mentor (2017).