One thing is now frighteningly clear: Limiting the death toll and broader impacts of this nightmare requires everyone to do their part. Stay put and practice safe hygiene. Yet that fact—that truth—raises an uncomfortable question: Can the public be trusted to behave responsibly?

The cynical answer is easy: nope. There is certainly evidence, of a kind, supporting this conclusion. America’s public education system is in shambles and has been for ages; our commander in chief is spewing potentially deadly misinformation and floating the idea of relaxing social distancing by Easter; Fox News, the dominant cable news channel, downplayed the pandemic’s seriousness; millions of Americans are influenced by quacks on Facebook who fear vaccines almost as much as they fear gluten.

For even more alarming examples of your fellow Americans failing to engender confidence, consider Sanitizer Man, toilet paper hoarders, booming business at a Bay Area gun store, and the college students gathered for spring break in South Florida—global pandemic be, like, damned. Last Sunday, The New York Times aggregated snippets of reporting from around the country for a story about “deniers and disbelievers” that could be boiled down to this: America’s army of morons is out in force, making this catastrophe worse.

Although not a balm for current anxieties, you may be interested to know that this urgent question—can we the people pull this off?—is at the heart of modern-day social psychology and decision science. A vast body of research in this field documents our cognitive biases and tendency to misjudge and misinterpret information. This would suggest that expecting everyone to master isolation and hygiene practices on short notice isn’t realistic. But there is another school of thought among researchers who study decisionmaking that may surprise you, and may even offer hope.

Let’s not mince words: We are wildly fallible creatures. Human cognition is clouded by all kinds of heuristics—mental shortcuts—and biases that mar our judgment and undermine our often well-intentioned quest for rational thinking and responsible action. If that’s news to you,(a) Where have you been? (b) Check out Nudge, Predictably Irrational, Sway, Freakonomics, Factfulness, much of the Malcolm Gladwell cannon, Shankar Vedantam’s Hidden Brain on NPR, or Daniel Kahneman’s masterful Thinking, Fast and Slow. Those should get you started.

I don’t know exactly why, but I love this stuff. Perhaps there’s something strangely poetic about the fact that rational thought itself is a chimera. A less grandiose possibility is that I’ve fallen for what one critic of behavioral economics calls “the poor man’s way of saying, ‘Hey, I’m smart.’”

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But back to Covid-19. In light of said fallibility, and knowing there are Americans, right now, denying the seriousness of this crisis, it’s only natural to worry that our cognitive biases will undermine decisionmaking about how to behave these next three or 33 weeks. Some may even conclude that, because permitting people to decide for themselves how to behave can be “problematic,” it would be wise for leadership to double down on restrictions enforcement or manipulate the public for its own good.

Public health experts are essentially united about the importance of leveling with the public, no matter how scary the information. But politicians? Calibrating public statements, ginning up fears or delivering overly calming messages, would be well within the range of normal. In a world obsessed with human foibles (and books about them), why wouldn’t politicians believe that the public—cue Jack Nicholson—can’t handle the truth?

Indeed, certain studies support the view that our biases could get us in trouble right now, or at least hinder our capacity to understand just how dire this situation is. Take for example, the difficulty of understanding exponential growth. In a 1975 paper, researchers William Wagenaar and Sabato D. Sagaria dryly note that many damaging global problems—population growth, pollution, food shortages—are driven by exponential processes. Addressing these issues, they wrote, “will depend on the cooperation of individual citizens.” So they figured it would be a good idea to see if people can quickly and intuitively grasp just how explosive exponential growth can be.