Because It Can Help Us Build an Effective Infodemic Response

The World Health Organization defines an infodemic as the spread of “false or misleading information in digital and physical environments during a disease outbreak. It causes confusion and risk-taking behaviors that can harm health. It also leads to mistrust in health authorities and undermines the public health response.” The U.S. Office of the Surgeon General has declared health misinformation to be a significant public health challenge. In a December 20, 2021, interview on PBS NewsHour, outgoing National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins expressed regret over the U.S. response to COVID-19 misinformation: "Maybe we underinvested in research on human behavior. I never imagined a year ago, when those vaccines were just proving to be fantastically safe and effective, that we would still have 60 million people who had not taken advantage of them because of misinformation and disinformation that somehow dominated all of the ways in which people were getting their answers."

Yet, despite widespread concern about the potential impacts of mis- and disinformation on health outcomes, we know little about the magnitudes of those impacts nor about their differential effects across sociodemographic groups. We also know little about cost-effective interventions that may mitigate those impacts and increase the spread and uptake of accurate health information.

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Because Vaccination is a Human—Not Technical—Process

The COVID-19 pandemic is being experienced by people—and without insights into individual and group experiences, real solutions are not possible.

Take, for instance, the selection of “Warp Speed” to describe the vaccine development initiative. A common fear in relation to medicine, including vaccines, is that anything developed quickly may not be safe. The use of “Warp Speed” exacerbated this. Had social scientists been consulted during the naming process, a more culturally acceptable title might have been chosen. Additionally social scientists could have advocated for a better explanation of the approval process—including the fact that all pharmaceuticals could be brought to market more quickly if the bureaucratic maze was cleared for them, as it was for the COVID-19 vaccine developers.

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Because It Can Help Employers Compassionately Plan for Returning to the Office

After a year of social distancing, mask wearing and – for millions – working from home, many employers are eager to bring their staff back to the office. But for many, the prospect of readjusting to in-person work is a daunting one.

A recent survey found that out of 4,553 office workers in five different countries, every single person reported feeling anxious about the idea of returning to in-person work.

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Because Leaders Need to Know How to Lead with Evidence

Being bad at math can kill people. Even experts who should understand medical science and help us make good health decisions sometimes fail. In December, a doctor—let’s call him Dr. Smith—advised a tweeter’s elderly mom not to get the COVID-19 vaccine because "99% of people fight off COVID, but [the vaccine is] only 93% effective.” This doctor is blatantly wrong. He doesn’t understand the math and is giving life-threatening advice. When even some experts struggle with numbers, it’s easy to see the problem.

2020 thrust a new world of statistics upon us—numbers of cases and deaths, false positive rates, and percentages of open ICU beds. Many of us track these numbers to stay informed and feel secure, but we don’t always understand or use them appropriately. Communicating facts isn’t always enough. But when facts are presented in forms that make sense to us—using the science of science communication—leaders can inform and motivate better choices.

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Because Controlling the COVID-19 Pandemic Depends on Vaccine Uptake

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused extraordinary devastation, claiming millions of lives and disrupting the economy and daily life across the globe. From the beginning, the course of the pandemic has depended on behavior – for example, whether people would engage in recommended public health actions like mask wearing and social distancing. Currently, the success of vaccination also hinges on behavior. While the successful development of vaccines is an incredibly important scientific breakthrough and their distribution and accessibility is critical, ultimately, the public’s willingness to get vaccinated will determine whether we bring this pandemic under control. Insights from the social and behavioral sciences can help ensure that efforts to encourage vaccination and address hesitancy succeed.

The Behavioral and Social Sciences Research Coordinating Committee at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), wanted to assist the public health community’s communication efforts to foster confidence in COVID-19 vaccines. To identify evidence-informed strategies for communicating about COVID-19 vaccines, we formed a trans-NIH working group consisting of behavioral and social science specialists across the NIH. On November 5th, 2020, the trans-NIH working group convened a multidisciplinary expert panel featuring 15 leading experts in public health and social science (e.g., communication, psychology, behavioral economics, health disparities, and anthropology). The expert panel was charged with identifying effective approaches for communicating about COVID-19 vaccines and suggesting ways these approaches could be tailored, targeted, and delivered to address the unique needs of diverse populations. The expert panel discussion formed the basis for recommendations about how government entities, such as U.S. federal agencies and partners at the state and local levels, could most effectively communicate vaccine-related information to a variety of constituents.

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Because It Can Help Us Cope with Pandemic Fatigue

As the pandemic drags on, following COVID-19 prevention guidelines can feel like more and more of a challenge.

This kind of fatigue is not unique to pandemic precautions like sticking with social distancing, masking up and keeping your hands washed. With all kinds of health-related behavior changes – including increasing physical activity, eating healthy and decreasing tobacco use – at least half of people relapse within six months.

Think back to the start of April. Much of the United States was under stay-at-home orders. New York City was experiencing close to a thousand COVID-19 deaths a day, and new cases of this previously unknown disease were popping up all over the country.

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Because We’re Living Through an “Infodemic”

In February 2020, about a month before COVID-19 became an inescapable reality around the world, the World Health Organization issued a warning about another, related danger: an “infodemic.” As conspiracy theories about the origins of COVID-19, the severity of its threat, and possible treatments circulated on social media, WHO officials cautioned that spreading false and misleading claims would make the work of combating the virus and its spread that much more difficult. They urged Silicon Valley’s Big Tech companies—especially social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok—to remove or flag content about COVID-19 that wasn’t based on science. Many have done so in the months since. However, once disinformation starts spreading online, it quickly takes on a life of its own.

COVID-19 is just one of many recent crises that disinformation campaigners and other digital extremists have taken advantage of to sow chaos, destabilize the news media ecosystem, and mobilize individuals and groups to their causes. From presidential elections, to civil rights movements, to public health programs, extremists look for opportunities to spread inaccurate or outright manufactured information, manipulate media coverage, and further their own agendas. Increasingly, they rely on digital tools like social media, online forums, and “do-it-yourself” image, video, and audio production to accomplish their goals. Following the violence at Charlottesville, Virginia’s “Unite the Right” rally in 2017, UC Irvine’s Office of Inclusive Excellence launched “Confronting Extremism,” an initiative “dedicated to understanding the ideas and behaviors advocated far outside of alignment to the campus values for social justice and equity in today’s society.” As part of that initiative, we have developed a collection of six self-paced teaching modules titled “Confronting Digital Extremism” that we hope will not only raise awareness of extremists’ “digital toolkits,” but also inspire effective means of confronting extremism online.

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Because Collective Behavior Change is the Only Way We Can Stop the Spread of COVID-19

The idea that led us to write the book titled Together Apart: The Psychology of COVID-19 was a very simple one. We reasoned that while waiting for an effective vaccine or a medical treatment for COVID-19, all we can do to stop the spread of the virus is to change our behavior. And what is more, because of the contagious nature of COVID-19, it is not just “my” behavior, it is the behavior of all of “us”— of all the groups that we belong to, of all our communities, and of society at large —that needs to change so that we can effectively control the COVID-19 spread.

In that sense, it is clear that the challenge that the COVID-19 outbreak poses is both huge and rather unique. It is unique in that, up until now, as social scientists, we have mostly focused on ways in which we can change individuals’ health behaviors. For instance, when a smoker wants to quit smoking, it is them as an individual we target because it is the individual who has to stop smoking. Likewise, when an individual wants to improve their physical fitness, we have to consider ways in which we can motivate them as an individual to, for example, join a gym. Even though the social environment that such individuals find themselves in is of crucial importance to facilitate such behavior change, it is ultimately an individual choice whether they quit undesirable habits and improve their physical health.

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Because We Will Need to Do Better in the Next Crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked a surge of interest in the press and social media in comparisons with other countries. When did the new virus reach other countries, how did they handle it, and how well did they do? I have lost count of the number of times I have read that the first COVID-19 deaths happened in the United States and South Korea at about the same time in January 2020, but it seems clear that the Koreans got on top of the epidemic, at least the first wave, while the United States did not.

This interest should survive this pandemic and broaden to include all sources of poor health, disease and death. South Korea did not suddenly start to outperform the United States in health last January. This has been true for decades. Life expectancy at birth (a weighted average of death rates at all ages) is the best single metric for the health of a population. In 2004, Korea and the US had almost exactly the same life expectancy at birth, even though the US spent a much larger percentage of its (much larger) gross national product (GNP) on the health sector. By 2018, before the discovery of the novel coronavirus, the US had gained one full year of life expectancy. Life expectancy in Korea improved by five years during the same period. Looking across the developed countries, it becomes clear that Korea’s improvement was better than most countries, but the US is really the outlier. We were caught up to and passed in this fundamental measure of population health by dozens of countries, many of which are considerably poorer, and all of which spend much less that the US on health services and research (Portugal, Costa Rica, Slovenia, Chile—not to mention all other rich countries of Europe, Canada and Japan). We need to ask difficult questions about our performance in the COVID-19 pandemic, but also about the obesity epidemic, the opioid epidemic, heart disease, cancers, stroke, injuries and all other causes of death and disability.

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Because Institutional Racism Exacerbates our Health and Economic Challenges

The COVID-19 epidemic is hitting African Americans particularly hard. As of this writing, 70% of all COVID-19 deaths in Louisiana are black residents in a state where only one-third of the population is black. To date, few states have released COVID-19 data by race, but the scant available information reveals that African Americans in Chicago, Milwaukee, and Detroit are being infected with and dying of COVID-19 at disproportionate rates.

Could the effects of historic and modern-day discrimination be contributing to these stunning statistics? In New Orleans, a city that is nearly 60% African American and has a small but growing Hispanic population, where the COVID-19 death rate is on a par per capita with New York City's, the answer is likely yes.

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