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The decision-making ability of college students — including some graduating this spring — was likely negatively impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, new research suggests.
Students in the small study conducted by Ohio State University researchers were less consistent in their decision-making during the 2020 fall semester compared to students who had participated in similar research in recent years.
The researchers compared student responses to a hypothetical situation during the pandemic with student responses in previous studies. They found evidence that in 2020, students were more likely to alternate between going by their gut and thinking more thoroughly about their answers, depending on how the scenario was described.
“Our theory is that the feeling of stress from everything that was going on limited students’ resources to really evaluate the information presented to them,” said lead author Melissa Buelow, a psychology professor at Ohio’s Newark campus.
The research also suggests that the long-standing and wide-ranging uncertainties associated with the global lockdown – very different from an acute stressor imposed in a laboratory – affected the brain region responsible for problem solving and decision making.
“I think this is one of the most important findings – that the stresses of everyday life can wax and wane, and they can potentially overwhelm your cognitive resources and you can see real downstream effects on everyday activities that drain your energy and effort. require,” said Buelow. “This study provides additional information to understand why students struggled to come to class, focus on class, and turn things in — because there was a global event that affected every part of their lives.”
Buelow conducted the research with Ohio State Newark psychology faculty members James Wirth and Jennifer Kowalsky. The research was recently published in the Journal of American College Health.
In Fall 2020, students on Ohio State campuses attended classes offered both virtually and in-person with reduced density and continued physical distancing, wearing masks and routine COVID-19 testing. Students were not believed to be infected with the coronavirus when they participated in this study.
Buelow and her colleagues were inspired to do the study after referring to their own foggy thinking as “pandemic brains” in casual conversation.
“We said when we go through this, we wonder if others were too,” Buelow said. “And while we were collecting data, we heard in the popular press about this idea of the stress of COVID leading to problems with thinking, processing information and making decisions.”
As a clinical neuropsychologist, Buelow has used the Adult Decision Making Competence (ADMC) scale in her research for ten years. The tool presents numerous scenarios, worded both positively and negatively, and prompts users to respond with their preferred solution or recommendation.
For this study, researchers compared data from a pre-pandemic sample of 722 students who had been assessed using the ADMC scale with data from 161 students who participated in one of two assessments during the fall semester of 2020.
The key finding: Rather than acknowledging that ethics-based scenarios resulted in the same outcome whether presented as a win or a loss, students in 2020 were more likely to answer differently based on how the information was worded.
“Confidence in whether ‘this is a win’ versus ‘this is a loss’ really played a role in decision making,” Buelow said.
Despite that inconsistency, the researchers noted that students in 2020 were just as confident as pre-pandemic participants that their decisions about accuracy-based questions were correct.
“That seemed interesting to us, with potential implications for the health and well-being of individuals who adequately perceive risk,” Buelow said. “Are individuals aware, so to speak, of what they do and don’t know? And if you don’t know that, does that lead to more risk?”
The researchers assessed an additional 72 students at two time points during the Spring 2022 semester to gauge whether COVID-19 vaccination and relaxed mask and distancing requirements reduced the effects of the pandemic on decision-making. Their exploratory analysis with this smaller sample showed that students continued to make less consistent decisions compared to pre-pandemic participants.
Buelow and colleagues continue to collect data to track changes in student decision making over time.
“Situational factors can influence why people make a good, beneficial decision versus a bad or risky decision, and that’s important context,” she said. “When we acutely pressurize individuals in the lab, we see a subsequent reduction in decision consistency. These findings really align with that — so we can theorize, in the absence of an acute lab stressor, that it was COVID, a much a more global factor affecting every aspect of our lives, which influenced cognition.”
More information:
Melissa T. Buelow et al, Poorer Student Decision Making During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence for “Pandemic Brains”, Journal of American College Health (2023). DOI: 10.1080/07448481.2023.2186129
Quote: Evidence of ‘pandemic brain’ in college students (2023, May 17) Retrieved May 17, 2023 from https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-05-evidence-pandemic-brain-college-students.html
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