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Mashup Score: 7
According to various sources the world is likely to witness another pandemic on the scale of COVID-19 in the future. How can the social and behavioral sciences contribute to a successful response? Here we conduct a cost-effectiveness analysis of an under-evaluated yet promising tool from modern social and behavioral science: the randomized controlled trial conducted in an online survey environment (“in-survey RCT”). Specifically, we analyze whether, in a pandemic context, a public health campaign that uses an in-survey RCT to pre-test two or more different message interventions — and then selects the top-performing one for their public outreach — has greater impact in expectation than a campaign which does not use this strategy. Our results are threefold. First, in-survey RCT pre-testing is plausibly cost-effective for public health campaigns with typical resources. Second, in-survey RCT pre-testing has potentially powerful returns to scale: for well-resourced campaigns, it looks highl
Source: osf.ioCategories: General Medicine News, Hem/OncsTweet
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Mashup Score: 2That’s a lot to Process! Pitfalls of Popular Path Models - 5 day(s) ago
Path models to test claims about mediation and moderation are a staple of psychology. But applied researchers may sometimes not understand the underlying causal inference problems and thus endorse conclusions that rest on unrealistic assumptions. In this article, we aim to provide a clear explanation for the limited conditions under which standard procedures for mediation and moderation analysis can succeed. We discuss why reversing arrows or comparing model fit indices cannot tell us which model is the right one, and how tests of conditional independence can at least tell us where our model goes wrong. Causal modeling practices in psychology are far from optimal but may be kept alive by domain norms which demand that every article makes some novel claim about processes and boundary conditions. We end with a vision for a different research culture in which causal inference is pursued in a much slower, more deliberate, and collaborative manner.
Source: osf.ioCategories: General Medicine News, Hem/OncsTweet
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Mashup Score: 1
We examined the extent to which constructs and measures have proliferated in psychological sci-ence. We integrated two large databases obtained from the American Psychology Association (APA) that they have used to keep track of constructs, measures, and research in the psychological science literature for the past 30 years. Our descriptive analyses finds that (i) thousands of new constructs and measures are published each year, (ii) most measures are used very few times, and (iii) there is no trend towards consensus or standardization in the use of constructs and measures; in fact, there is a slight trend towards even greater fragmentation over time. That is, constructs and measures are proliferating. We conclude that measurement in the psychological science litera-ture is fragmented, creating problems such as redundancy and confusion, and stifling cumulative scientific progress. We conclude by providing suggestions for what researchers can do about this problem.
Source: osf.ioCategories: General Medicine News, Hem/OncsTweet
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Mashup Score: 0
People seem willing to censor disagreeable political and moral ideas. Five studies explore why people engage in political censorship and test a potential route to decreasing censorship. While Americans report being generally supportive of free speech and against censorship (Study 1), we find that people censor material that seems harmful and false (Study 2)—which are often ideas from political opponents (Study 3). Building on work demonstrating the perceived truth of experiences, we test an experience-sharing intervention that, among college students, decreases the perception that controversial campus speakers are sharing harmful and false ideas related to gun policy, thereby reducing students’ willingness to censor their ideas (Study 4). We also find benefits of experience sharing in the abortion debate—with Americans less willing to censor and report the social media posts of opponents who base their views on lived experiences rather than scientific findings (Study 5).
Source: osf.ioCategories: General Medicine News, Hem/OncsTweet
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Mashup Score: 32
The concept of representations is widely used across the cognitive sciences, but its meaning is highly contested. Representations are often thought of as “vehicles” with “content” – that is, internal physical patterns that are correlated with some state of affairs and that usefully convey that state of affairs to the rest of the neural system or the cognitive economy at large. This raises a number of problems: how does an internal pattern come to be correlated with something else? How does the rest of the system know what the pattern means? How does the system know what to do with that information? I suggest that thinking of representations as vehicles with content presents a stumbling block to answering these questions. Instead, thinking of them simply as meaningful patterns offers a more naturalistic framework for understanding their roles in perception, behavioural control, and cognition. Meaning is not contained within a vehicle – it is relational, contextual, and interpretive. Her
Source: osf.ioCategories: General Medicine News, Future of MedicineTweet
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Mashup Score: 0Skill but not Effort Drive GPT Overperformance over Humans in Cognitive Reframing of Negative Scenarios - 17 day(s) ago
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs), such as GPT, have led to their implementation in tasks involving emotional support. However, LLM performance has not been compared to humans in both quality and the type of content produced. We examined this question by focusing on the skill of reframing negative situations to reduce negative emotions, also known as cognitive reappraisal. We trained both humans (N= 601) and GPT-4 to reframe negative vignettes (Nreappraisals = 4195) and compared their performance using human raters (N = 1744). GPT-4 outperformed humans on three of the four examined metrics. We investigated whether the gap was driven by effort or skill by incentivizing participants to produce better reappraisals, which led to increased time spent on reappraisals but did not decrease the gap between humans and GPT-4. Content analysis suggested that high-quality reappraisals produced by GPT-4 were associated with being more semantically similar to the emotional scenarios
Source: osf.ioCategories: General Medicine News, Hem/OncsTweet
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Mashup Score: 1
Norms on social media tend to be more extreme than offline norms–creating false perceptions of norms. The current paper explains how modern technology interacts with human psychology to create a funhouse mirror version of social norms. Specifically, we integrate research from political science, psychology, and cognitive science to explain how online environments become saturated with false norms, who is misrepresented online, what happens when online norms deviate from offline norms, where people are affected online, and why expressions are more extreme online. We provide a framework for understanding and correcting for the distortions in our perceptions of social norms that are created by social media platforms. We argue the funhouse mirror nature of social media can be pernicious for individuals and society by increasing pluralistic ignorance and false polarization.
Source: osf.ioCategories: General Medicine News, Hem/OncsTweet
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Mashup Score: 0The Effect of a Real-World, Long-Term Media Literacy Intervention: A Difference-in-Differences Approach - 21 day(s) ago
As the fight against misinformation continues, governments across the world have started to invest in media literacy interventions. It is hoped that such interventions help citizens become better at discerning between untrustworthy and mainstream news headlines, but studies relying on online- and field-experiments provide inconclusive or even worrying results: media literacy interventions targeting misinformation either have no effect, help citizens recognize fake news, but also reduce trust in mainstream news. Leveraging a natural setting in a high school in the Netherlands and using a Difference-in-Differences (DiD) approach, I show that a long-term literacy course increased students’ ability to accurately assess the reliability of mainstream, but not untrustworthy news. Since the prevalence of the latter is much lower than that of the former, I argue this to be a welcome finding. Additionally, I show how real-world, intensive courses allow for unique opportunities to test the effect
Source: osf.ioCategories: General Medicine News, Hem/OncsTweet
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Mashup Score: 3Emotional language reduces belief in false claims - 22 day(s) ago
Emotional appeals are a common manipulation tactic, and it is broadly assumed that emotionality increases belief in misinformation. However, past work confounds the use of emotional language per se with the type of factual claims that tend to be communicated with emotion. In two experimental studies, we test the effects of manipulating the level of emotional language in false headlines while holding the factual claim constant. We find that in the absence of a fact-check, the high-emotion version of a given factual claim was believed significantly less than the low-emotion version; in the presence of a fact-check, belief was comparatively low regardless of emotionality. A third experiment found that decreased belief in high-emotionality claims is greater for false claims than true claims, such that emotionality increases truth discernment overall. Finally, we analyze the social media platform X’s Community Notes program, in which users evaluate claims (“community notes”) made by others.
Source: osf.ioCategories: General Medicine News, Hem/OncsTweet
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Mashup Score: 0
Domestic abuse(DA) – abusive behaviour perpetrated by an adult towards another adult to whom they are personally connected (e.g. partners, ex-partners, or family members) – has major consequences for public mental health and mental health service use. Training and guidance for mental health professionals on identifying and responding to patients exposed to DA are available, but there has been less development of resources for mental health professionals in identifying, assessing, and responding to perpetrators of DA. In this article, we describe a framework for responding to DA perpetration in clinical settings in general adult mental health services, aimed at improving practice. This could support mental health professionals in sensitive enquiry and assessment for DA perpetration, and guide appropriate responses, as part of routine training and continuing professional development opportunities.
Source: osf.ioCategories: General Medicine News, Hem/OncsTweet
Cost-effectiveness analysis of in-survey RCT pre-testing to increase the impact of public health campaigns in a pandemic. https://t.co/k8pNP9mEnc via @Ben_Tappin & @lukebeehewitt https://t.co/njYUJESO9W