BEGIN Lab

Amazing first day at World Congress of Epidemiology 2024. Discussing behavioural design for epidemiologists. I’m so proud to be part of the efforts to build capacity in this field that Indlela Behavioural Insights is leading. So thankful for all I am learning and those I get to meet along the way. #WCE2024 #behaviouraldesign #epidemiology #behaviouraleconomics Candice M Chetty-Makkan Sophie Pascoe Alison Buttenheim Preethi Mistri Simamkele Bokolo Lawrence Long Brendan Maughan-Brown

A recent piece in the The Chronicle of Higher Education called for scholars to "stop studying misinformation". A profoundly unscientific and harmful proposal. With Stephan Lewandowsky and Oreskes Naomi we reply & explain why scholars should absolutely keep studying misinformation. Failing to define, measure, & counter misinformation will put democracy at risk! https://lnkd.in/eJaQP7Cm

Rebecca Foley is #hiring. Know anyone who might be interested?

A new paper in JAMA Network Open by Team Scientists David Asch & Alison Buttenheim found that behavioral nudges for clinicians and patients may boost the rate of serious illness conversations (SICs) for high-risk cancer patients. Read the full article here:

🚨 New Publication Alert 🚨 🧠 Psychological vaccines (inoculation) can offer cognitive protection against fake news. But do these interventions work even against socially endorsed misinformation? 🎯 Research has demonstrated that certain social cues can amplify the persuasiveness of fake news. In this new publication in Advances.in with Sander van der Linden (University of Cambridge) & Thomas Morton (University of Copenhagen (Københavns Universitet)), we tested whether an emotion-fallacy inoculation intervention could counteract socially endorsed misinformation. 💉 We show that an inoculation message that focuses on the role of emotional deception in news: 1️⃣ Reduces the perceived reliability of misinformation 2️⃣ Enhances confidence in reliability judgments 3️⃣ Improves veracity discernment (ability to distinguish between true and false) 👥 We also find that certain social cues significantly increase the persuasiveness of emotionally deceptive news - if we think other people believe false headlines, we're likely to too. 🛡️ However the inoculation intervention remains effective even in the face of persuasive social cues. ⬇ Link to the full paper and our previous Scientific Reports paper on social cues in comments below. #misinformation #fakenews #interventions #inoculation #behaviouralscience #behavioralscience #policymaking #scienceforpolicy #socialscience #psychology #publicpolicy #publichealth #science #research #emotions

Join us at the AIDS 2024 Conference! Indlela in collaboration with Audere, will host a satellite session. For more details, please see the poster below and visit our website: https://shorturl.at/EhGEK for additional presentations and our roadmap featuring Behavioural Economics (BE) related research that will be presented at the conference.

When the FDA VRBPAC committee was set to review emergency use authorization of the COVID-19 vaccines for children in October 2021, over 170,000 (!) public comments about extending the EUA were submitted through regulations.gov. The vast majority of comments were vehemently opposed to vaccinating kids against COVID-19. What policy-relevant insights can we distill from this huge corpus of public opinion? In a paper just out in Health Affairs Scholar, Aleksandra Golos, Sharath Chandra Guntuku and I tackled that question with Natural Language Processing, topic modeling, and thematic analysis. In "“Do not inject our babies”: a social listening analysis of public opinion about authorizing pediatric COVID-19 vaccines", we identified three unique domains that enabled a nuanced understanding of the substance of commenters’ arguments (the “What”), the worldviews and foundational beliefs underlying those arguments (the “Why”), and the rheotorical and discursive characteristics of anti-vaccine arguments (the “How”). All three domains have important implications for clinicians who counsel vaccine-hesitant parents and for public health entities designing public health promotion campaigns. The article is Open Access - please read and share! https://lnkd.in/eXbqBzEH

The latest edition of the BCFG Newsletter is out today! Read it here: bit.ly/4eJ6DRZ