Sandro Romano Wins a Yale Award

WITH A PAPER ON THE WAY MASS MEDIA PRESENT DATA ABOUT THE COVID PANDEMIC, THE ASSISTANT PROFESSOR AT BOCCONI DEPARTMENT OF LEGAL STUDIES OBTAINED THE MARGARET GRUTER PRIZE

Sandro Romano, Assistant Professor at Bocconi Department of Legal Studies, won the 2020 Margaret Gruter Prize, awarded to a Yale student (Professor Romano obtained a LLM from Yale Law School) for the best paper on how ethology, biology, and related behavior sciences may deepen understanding of law.
 
The Prize honors the late Dr Margaret Gruter, founder of the Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research, a research community that fosters collaboration across disciplines in order advance our understanding of the interplay between law, institutions and human behavior.
 
The Prize-winning paper, “The Scale of COVID‐19 Graphs Affects Understanding, Attitudes, and Policy Preferences”, that Prof. Romano wrote in joint with Chiara Sotis, Goran Dominioni, and Sebastián Guidi, compares the effect of mass media presenting data about the COVID-19 pandemic in a linear or in a logarithmic scale. In a log scale graph, quantities on the Y-axis are not evenly spaced: moving a unit of distance along the axis does not mean adding a quantity, but multiplying by a factor – this presentation is often used to fit phenomena with exponential growth in a small space. Romano and his colleagues conclude that people exposed to graphs in a log scale have a less accurate understanding of how the pandemic is developing, make less accurate predictions on its evolution, and underestimate the risk. “Thus, mass media and policymakers communicating to the general public should always describe the evolution of the pandemic using a graph on a linear scale, at least as a default option,” they conclude.
 
The paper is forthcoming (and published online before inclusion in an issue) in Health Economics.

by Fabio Todesco