BEGIN Lab’s Post

🚨 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

Officially completed one of Harvard University ‘s introductory courses with an interdisciplinary view of global health through HarvardX. The course titled “Global Health Case Studies from a Biosocial Perspective” focused on framing global health’s collection of issues (HIV/AIDS, TB, Ebola, etc.) within a particular biosocial perspective. It has assisted me in developing a toolkit of analytical approaches to examine historical and contemporary global health initiatives with precise attention to a critical sociology of knowledge. The teaching team, four physician-anthropologists, drew on experiences working in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, and the Americas, to investigate what the field of global health may include, how global health problems are defined and constructed, and how global health interventions play out in expected and unexpected mannerisms.

#HighlyCitedPapers 📝 Pathophysiological Studies of Monoaminergic Neurotransmission Systems in Valproic Acid-Induced Model of Autism Spectrum Disorder — Kuo and Liu. In this paper, the authors aimed to summarize and discuss the pathological changes in monoaminergic systems related to Autism spectrum disorder etiology. Full text is available 👇 https://lnkd.in/dPg3-7xJ #medicine #health #research #science

https://lnkd.in/exAEBsGB This summer I have the opportunity to pursue another independent research project on the mediating relationship of life satisfaction between familial opioid abuse and academic self-efficacy. If you are between the ages of 18-27, please consider taking this survey to further psychological research on the Opioid Crisis! Copy and paste this link into your internet browser, or follow the link posted on my page.

📢 Excited to share my new paper with Jon Roozenbeek & Sander van der Linden on using gamified psychological vaccines to reduce misinformation susceptibility in Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review 🎮 🚨 Misinformation was recently listed as the #1 societal threat by the World Economic Forum. What can psychologists and behavioural scientists do about this? 💉 🧠 Research has shown that it is possible to psychologically vaccinate news consumers against misinformation through gamified interventions. 🌍 But, in the real world, people prefer to get news from news sources that politically align with their opinions and beliefs. 🔍 Due to perceiving these outlets as more credible, news consumers are often more susceptible to believing fake news shared by these political "ingroups". 🕵️♂️ Here, we experimentally test whether these 'vaccines' can protect news consumers against misinformation - EVEN if it comes from politically congenial news sources, which often biases judgements. 🎯 3 Key Findings: 1️⃣ Participants were more susceptible to misinformation published by political ingroup sources PRE-intervention. 2️⃣ The intervention reduced susceptibility to misinformation even from political ingroup outlets. 3️⃣ The ingroup bias was no longer present POST-intervention. Find the full paper in the comments! #Misinformation #Psychology #InoculationTheory #BehavioralScience #BehaviouralScience #Research #HarvardKennedySchool #GamifiedInterventions #SocialScience #NewsConsumption #PublicHealth #ScienceCommunication #MediaLiteracy #WorldEconomicForum #SocietalThreat #CambridgeResearch #Interventions #News #FakeNews #PublicPolicy #Psychologists University of Cambridge

In this week’s Unpacking Bedside Bioethics webinar, "The Angst in Adolescent Decision-Making,” Ian Wolfe, PhD, MA, RN, HEC-C, helped explore the ethical tensions leading to difficulties in adolescent decision-making, facilitated an understanding of why these tensions are important, and provided a framework to navigate these tensions in practice. You can watch it here: https://lnkd.in/g6B-ET8d

How we write and think about neurodiversity can have a profound effect on people’s lives; watch the webinar hosted by Cell Press and The Lancet. #Neurodiversity #ElsevierTogether

Early disease detection is vital at every age—it improves health outcomes and reduces treatment costs. Yet, many people tend to procrastinate when it comes to screening. Our latest research forthcoming in the Journal of Consumer Psychology (with my wonderful coauthors Ms. Yuting Pang and Prof. Lili Wang) reveals that tailoring disease detection messages to the audience’s age can significantly increase their persuasiveness. Specifically, we show that as people age, gain-framed messages (highlighting the benefits of taking action) become more effective than loss-framed ones. We also identified information diagnosticity as a key psychological mechanism behind this age-related effect. Check out the full article here: https://lnkd.in/gnJ5Uc25 Society for Consumer Psychology, University of Macau, Faculty of Business Administration, University of Macau #HealthCommunication #ConsumerPsychology #DiseaseDetection #InformationProcessing

Reading Antifragile by Nassim Taleb, I came across an interesting little story (not sure if true or not as I couldn't find a reference). But it goes a little something like this and warns professionals about naive interventionism - which I think is relevant for anyone intervening, like in our field of online experimentation. In 1930s, 389 children were presented to a set of doctors and 174 were recommended to be intervened with a medical procedure - tonsillectomy. The remaining 215 children were presented to a 2nd set of doctors which recommended an additional 99 interventions. The remaining 116 children were again presented to a 3rd set of doctors which recommended an additional 52 interventions. The message is clear: naive interventionism occurs when the decision to act (or not) is not driven by the situation/context/subject but by the practitioner's bias (who does not share the risk / nor skin in the game). Taleb reminds that the morbidity rate at that time for this procedure was in the 2-4% range. ------ Back to experimentation. It may be rather rare that online experiments would have such dramatic and negative effects (although not impossible). Rather, naive interventionism may manifest itself in more subtle ways whether we're conscious of it or not. Here are some examples: 👉🏽 When we hear that there are no "losing" experiments (implying that all negative or flat outcomes can eventually be turned around) 👉🏽 When our prioritization does not allow for negative bets (ex: 1-10; low, medium, or high impact ranges) - encouraging all ideas to be eventually tested (without any discouragement). 👉🏽 When we have positive prior probabilities about the variant and must run a new experiment nevertheless. Here, a controlled experiment by definition INHIBITS or DELAYS some of the population from benefiting from the probably better variant (assuming it does replicate as predicted). I strongly believe that controlled experiments are an extremely useful and reliable method for collecting evidence with a very high sensitivity. But it also comes with risks, costs and we don't always have to test everything. Taleb does remind us to express both our negative and positive bets as accurately and honestly as we can. Source: Taleb, N. N. (2012). Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder (p. 110). Random House. #experimentation #optimization #antifragile

The blog post, Unmasking The Silent Epidemic: Shattering Misconceptions About Prescription Drug Abuse, explores the vastly overlooked issue of prescription drug abuse, its easy accessibility, and its impact on all demographics, including youth and the elderly. Highlighting opioids, benzodiazepines, and stimulants as the most misused, the article discusses the serious physical, mental, and legal consequences of misuse. The piece emphasizes the critical role of prevention and intervention strategies, such as education, prescription monitoring, and proper drug disposal, in battling this global crisis.