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<p>As urban heat intensifies across Europe, cities are increasingly installing drinking fountains to secure public hydration access. However, psychological barriers may limit the strategy’s effectiveness. Here we show that pathogen-avoidance mechanisms are strongly associated with lifetime public drinking fountain use across German populations. Among elderly (<i>n</i> = 308) and representative general populations (<i>n</i> = 1,095), a standard deviation increase in contamination aversion was associated with 49% and 32% lower odds of ever using fountains. In a natural experiment across multiple drinking fountains (<i>N</i> = 14,128 encounters), signage communicating the fountains’ contamination safety was associated with 82% higher odds of direct drinking and 37% higher odds of cooling behaviours. Temporal point process modelling of usage time series revealed strong signatures of social amplification effects that were attenuated in the signage condition, indicating more independent, self-initiated rather than precursor-dependent usages. The findings highlight how psychological mechanisms interact with implementation strategies and should be considered in public infrastructure design.</p>

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Understanding and addressing contamination aversion in the use of drinking fountains

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年1月2日

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  • Robert W. Bruckmann,
  • Philipp Sprengholz

摘要

As urban heat intensifies across Europe, cities are increasingly installing drinking fountains to secure public hydration access. However, psychological barriers may limit the strategy’s effectiveness. Here we show that pathogen-avoidance mechanisms are strongly associated with lifetime public drinking fountain use across German populations. Among elderly (n = 308) and representative general populations (n = 1,095), a standard deviation increase in contamination aversion was associated with 49% and 32% lower odds of ever using fountains. In a natural experiment across multiple drinking fountains (N = 14,128 encounters), signage communicating the fountains’ contamination safety was associated with 82% higher odds of direct drinking and 37% higher odds of cooling behaviours. Temporal point process modelling of usage time series revealed strong signatures of social amplification effects that were attenuated in the signage condition, indicating more independent, self-initiated rather than precursor-dependent usages. The findings highlight how psychological mechanisms interact with implementation strategies and should be considered in public infrastructure design.