About three in four people say they have hidden an infectious illness from others, often so they would not miss a party or fall behind at work. That is the central finding of ten studies with more than 4,000 American adults.
The paper, “When and Why People Conceal Infectious Disease,” by Wilson N. Merrell, Soyeon Choi and Joshua M. Ackerman, was published online in Psychological Science on January 24, 2024.
Ten studies, 4,110 people
People who are sick with something contagious can face social costs such as being excluded, which gives them a reason to keep it quiet. The researchers examined how common that concealment is and what drives it, looking at past, current and imagined illnesses.
Their samples included US university students, health-care employees and online crowdsourced workers, 4,110 adults in total. About 75% reported concealing illness in their interactions with others, possibly placing those people in harm’s way.
Parties and deadlines come first
The reasons were mostly social, such as wanting to attend events like parties, or tied to achievement, such as completing work objectives. Features of the disease mattered too, including how harmful it could be and how immediate the illness was.
Here the researchers found a telling gap. People imagining a harmful infection, rather than a mild one, said they would conceal it less often. But participants who were actually sick concealed frequently regardless of how harmful their illness was. The authors read this as a sign of state-specific biases: being ill changes the calculation.
They describe concealment as a widespread behaviour in which people trade off risks to others in favour of their own goals, with potentially important consequences for public health.
Study Details:
- Title: When and Why People Conceal Infectious Disease
- Authors: Wilson N. Merrell, Soyeon Choi, Joshua M. Ackerman
- Journal: Psychological Science
- Publication Date: January 24, 2024
- DOI: 10.1177/09567976231221990