Valuing of human life during the coronavirus pandemic

The aim of this study is to determine whether people are subject to psychophysical numbness during the corona virus pandemic, as well as whether they estimate human lives to be less valuable as the numbers of those infected and dying from the virus increase. In the first and second experiment, the contextual influence of the ratio of the number of the cured-infected and the positive-negative framework on the evaluation of the contribution of healthcare workers, as a measure of the value of human lives, was investigated, respectively. The third experiment aimed at analysing whether the type of inevitable disaster and the amount of money allocated for repairing the consequences affected the evaluation of human life. The contribution of healthcare workers was assessed by 354 respondents in the first experiment, 725 respondents in the second and 729 respondents in the third experiment. The results indicate that the assessment of the contribution of healthcare workers does not depend on the number and percentage of the cured. The main effects of the scenario (the pandemic curve) and framework (positive/negative) are not significant, but their interaction is. The results of the third experiment suggest that valuing of human lives does not depend on the type of catastrophe (the pandemic vs. flood) but on the amount of funds allocated for helping the endangered people. These results have implications for decision-makers during disasters; namely, they should avoid giving only numbers when reporting on the disaster, but combine information on the number of survivors and deaths depending on the current situation, as well as report on individual cases, regardless of the type of disaster.