Limitations and future directions
nose and mouth, impulsivity, ’
EVENTS
The main limitations of this study were that the heterogeneity of the experience of certain types of urges rendered the sample size too small to draw accurate inferences in some domains. Only around 20 individuals, spread over three groups, reported having urges to avoid getting tested or to avoid leaving details for contact tracing at least once. Furthermore, the lack of evidence that the manipulations affected self-control could be due to a lack of power, rather than the absence of a meaningful effect. The assumptions we made for our power analysis were optimistic, especially because we did not account for participant clustering of responses.The lack of power is also visible in the effect size estimates of the compassion manipulation’s influence on the likelihood of covering one’s nose and mouth while coughing or sneezing, where the spread of the confidence interval suggests near empty strata. Hence there remains considerable uncertainty about the effectiveness of the intervention in these domains.This speaks to the strengths and weaknesses of the ecological momentary assessment paradigm because, on the one hand, it is a powerful paradigm for events that occur often and to a wide range of people (such as the urge to abandon social distancing), and it can provide insight into behaviour ‘in the wild’. On the other hand, for events that only happen for a narrow subset of people, or that happen infrequently, ecological momentary assessment needs to be applied to that particular subset, or another approach should be considered. A further limitation concerns the extent to which the findings apply to different populations. Ecological momentary assessment is known to generate missing data, which creates uncertainty about effect size estimates and reduces overall data quality. In our study, we mitigated this cost of ecological approaches by incentivising high compliance and implementing a compliance threshold. Nonetheless, the effect size estimates we report should be considered in light of the uncertainty associated with missing data.Another limitation of the current work is that we did not administer any baseline scales to investigate whether individual differences, such as impulsivity or compassion traits, predict responsiveness to the interventions. The lack of evidence for a relationship between the baseline variables we collected and self-control also need not generalise to the population because of our sample size limitations.In the current work, participants were asked to engage with others’ suffering and prompted to consider that their actions influence the situation they were asked to picture. We did not explore exactly how participants’ states changed after the manipulations to avoid demand characteristics, so we cannot be sure about the exact mechanisms that caused the observed effects. Future research could, for example, investigate whether only empathising with the suffering would be sufficient, or whether stronger language linking one’s own behaviour to others’ suffering would be more effective.Future research could focus on the role of behavioural science interventions, including, but not limited to, episodic future thinking and compassion-inducing exercises, in producing desired behaviour during public health crises. In this line of research, it may be promising to also consider the combination of compassion and episodic future thinking, to see if the effects might interact positively.Further research could also address whether individual differences can predict responsiveness to this type of intervention. We did not administer any baseline scales to investigate whether individual differences, such as impulsivity or compassion traits, predict responsiveness to the interventions.We also deem it important that more research is devoted to uncovering the factors predicting moment-to-moment decision-making in people’s daily lives, where ecological momentary assessment and GPS data [