Justification of Decision-Making in Response to COVID-19 Socio-Scientific Dilemmas

Argumentation skills are important for informed decision-making, especially in everyday life when engaging with science. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic is an ideal opportunity to study laypeople’s use of argumentation skills when engaging with a scientific issue daily, while making relevant decisions that affect their families and society. This study frames the pandemic as a Socio-Scientific Issue (SSI)—a scientific issue with links to several social science disciplines (economics, politics, and sociology). The current study explores decision making and argumentation in the context of COVID-19 among the Israeli public as well as the connection between demographic characteristics, scientific knowledge and education and the quality of their argumentations. An online survey to examine responses to 2 specifically designed social dilemmas was conducted in April 2020 (n = 439). Our findings suggest that laypeople tend to use justifications that were classified as ‘scientific argumentation’ but we could not demonstrate a connection between demographic characteristics, scientific knowledge and decision making. We did find a positive connection between peoples’ perception of control over the situation and their compliance with the official guidelines. As a relevant Socio-Scientific Issue (SSI), COVID-19 stretched to the limit the need for public argumentation with changing scientific and medical information.