Weekend Wrap-up #03 - Peace over the Green Pass

The biggest news last week was around the Covishield vaccine being left out of EU travel list; followed by nine European countries including Covishield in their green pass. Sure this, very interesting show of muscle by India, displayed some aspects of behavioural science. Read on for my take on it. Please excuse my bias on the subject.

Reactive Devaluation

Reactive devaluation is when someone discounts the value of an offer because they don't like the person giving them the offer.

Now Europe may not dislike India but just us being from the orange zone and not from the green zone countries seems to driving their reaction to Covishield. This seems to be reflected in the EMA statement that said that even though it may use an analogous production technology to Vaxzevria (the COVID-19 AstraZeneca vaccine authorised in the EU), Covishield as such is not currently approved under EU rules.

Endowment effect

The endowment effect describes how people tend to value items that they own more highly than they would if they did not belong to them. 

Covishield is the biologically identical, but Indian-manufactured version of Vaxzevria. Does that explain the EMA's affinity to the latter.

Reciprocity 

Reciprocity is a social norm that involves in-kind exchanges between people—responding to another’s action with another equivalent action. It is usually positive, but it can also be negative.

Well this really doesn't need any explanation... India has played on this principle when it expected its CoWIN vaccination certificate to be recognised by the European Union on a reciprocal basis for travel.

While the first three concepts above, are about the event itself; the last two are about related activities. 

In-group Bias/Hindsight Bias

In-group Bias is the tendency for people to give preferential treatment to others who belong to the same group that they do.

Hindsight bias is a psychological phenomenon in which one becomes convinced they accurately predicted an event before it occurred.

When Covishield initially didn't make it to the green pass-list, I saw a surprising number of people who had taken Covaxin, drawing attention to the news on social media. Was it because the Covishield in-group was touting their future freedom to travel tirelessly? Or was it the Covaxin in-group displaying their hindsight bias?

Nudging

A nudge is any behavioural intervention that influences your behaviour without explicitly saying do this or don’t do this.

The green pass is expected to ease travel restrictions for people travelling to EU countries. According to the official EU website, the certificate holder should in principle be exempted from free movement restrictions and Member States should refrain from imposing additional travel restrictions on the holders of an EU Digital COVID Certificate, unless they are necessary and proportionate to safeguard public health. It is not compulsory. But it is certainly a nudge towards vaccination for anyone wanting to wander through Europe.

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I am sharing my posting schedule herewith... do look out for topics that might interest you:

Tuesday: Regular posts under Intriguing Insights and Inexplicable Influences

Thursday: To BE or not to BE - Behavioural Economic (BE) terms and their popular explanations or definitions.

Sunday: Weekend Wrap-up where I select an event or incident from the week that was and analyse some aspect of it.

Last Saturday of every month: My monthly post in the Intellectual Imprints section