Willingness to comply with biosecurity in livestock facilities: Evidence from experimental simulations

Authors

Scott C. Merrill, University of Vermont
Susan Moegenburg, University of Vermont
Christopher J. Koliba, University of Vermont
Asim Zia, University of Vermont
Luke Trinity, University of Vermont
Eric Clark, University of Vermont
Gabriela Bucini, University of Vermont
Serge Wiltshire, University of Vermont
Timothy Sellnow, University of Central Florida
Deanna Sellnow, University of Central Florida
Julia M. Smith, University of Vermont

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-2019

Abstract

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. Disease in U.S. animal livestock industries annually costs over a billion dollars. Adoption and compliance with biosecurity practices is necessary to successfully reduce the risk of disease introduction or spread. Yet, a variety of human behaviors, such as the urge to minimize time costs, may induce non-compliance with biosecurity practices. Utilizing a “serious gaming” approach, we examine how information about infection risk impacts compliance with biosecurity practices. We sought to understand how simulated environments affected compliance behavior with treatments that varied using three factors: (1) the risk of acquiring an infection, (2) the delivery method of the infection risk message (numerical, linguistic and graphical), and (3) the certainty of the infection risk information. Here we show that compliance is influenced by message delivery methodology, with numeric, linguistic, and graphical messages showing increasing efficacy, respectively. Moreover, increased situational uncertainty and increased risk were correlated with increases in compliance behavior. These results provide insight toward developing messages that are more effective and provide tools that will allow managers of livestock facilities and policy makers to nudge behavior toward more disease resilient systems via greater compliance with biosecurity practices.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Rights Information

© 2019 Merrill, Moegenburg, Koliba, Zia, Trinity, Clark, Bucini, Wiltshire, Sellnow, Sellnow and Smith.

Recommended Citation

Merrill SC, Moegenburg S, Koliba CJ, Zia A, Trinity L, Clark E, Bucini G, Wiltshire S, Sellnow T, Sellnow D, Smith JM. Willingness to comply with biosecurity in livestock facilities: Evidence from experimental simulations. Frontiers in Veterinary Science. 2019 Jun 4;6:156.

DOI

10.3389/fvets.2019.00156