Abstract
People’s risk perceptions toward the COVID-19 pandemic have been well documented, but the understanding of how pandemic-related information elicits public health behaviours and how different cultural, geographic, and policy contexts influence them is still limited. This study aimed to identify similarities and differences among the UK, Japan, and Taiwan to empirically investigate how people evaluate COVID-19-related information when deciding whether to take risk-averse behaviour. It also explored whether subgroups exist among the public that share similar characteristics related to attitude change on COVID-19 situations. Comparative regional surveys incorporating identical conjoint experimental design were administered. A conjoint analysis conducted on each region’s data found that people in Japan and Taiwan decided whether to perform risk-averse behaviour based on the nationwide number of new daily infections, while those in the UK placed the most importance on the situation of direct contact via the presence of infections in their workplace or home. Statistical clustering using a finite mixture model revealed two distinctive sub-groups across each region: a risk-taking class with a low frequency of risk-averse behaviour, comprising predominantly young men and vaccine-hesitant individuals with low trust in governmental health policy; and a prudent class with a high frequency of risk-averse behaviour, comprising individuals with higher science literacy. The study’s findings can contribute to policymakers’ and medical experts’ deeper understanding of the relationship between information provision and behaviours related to a new infectious disease, as well as emphasise that data-driven analysis can be leveraged to gain deeper insights into complex societal behaviours.