10.31234/osf.io/naxf3

It is urgent to understand how to most effectively communicate public health messages during the COVID-19 pandemic. Previously, the focus has been on how to formulate the message, rather than on who should send it, and particularly little is known about the latter during times of crisis. We report on the effectiveness of different public figures at promoting social distancing in 6 countries severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Across countries and demographic strata, immunology expert Dr. Anthony Fauci achieved the highest level of respondents’ willingness to reshare a call to social distancing, followed by a government spokesperson. Celebrity spokespersons were least effective. The likelihood of message resharing increased with age and when respondents expressed positive sentiments towards the spokesperson. Effective messaging during the COVID-19 pandemic can save lives, and the messenger matters

THE FAUCI EFFECT: PUBLIC HEALTH MESSAGING DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

10.31234/osf.io/924gq

Moral intuitions are a central motivator in human behavior. Recent work highlights the importance of moral intuitions for understanding a wide range of issues ranging from online radicalization to vaccine hesitancy. Extracting and analyzing moral content in messages, narratives, and other forms of public discourse is a critical step toward understanding how the psychological influence of moral judgments unfolds at a global scale. Extant approaches for extracting moral content are limited in their ability to capture the intuitive nature of moral sensibilities, constraining their usefulness for understanding and predicting human moral behavior. Here we introduce the extended Moral Foundations Dictionary (eMFD), a dictionary-based tool for extracting moral content from textual corpora. The eMFD, unlike previous methods, is constructed from text annotations generated by a large sample of human coders. We demonstrate that the eMFD outperforms existing approaches in a variety of domains. We anticipate that the eMFD will contribute to advance the study of moral intuitions and their influence on social, psychological, and communicative processes.

The Extended Moral Foundations Dictionary (eMFD): Development and Applications of a Crowd-Sourced Approach to Extracting Moral Intuitions from Text

Once the worst of the coronavirus crisis is over what might 'the new normal’ have in store for us? How might our society be changed six months, a year, five years, 20 years into the future? On 5 May 2020 BPS members Dr Rowena Hill (Nottingham Trent University, currently seconded to cross-governmental Covid-19 Foresight Group), Professor Susan Michie (Professor of Health Psychology and Director of the Centre for Behaviour Change at UCL), Kathryn Scott (Director of Policy, British Psychological Society) and Dr Jon Sutton (Managing Editor, The Psychologist) hosted a webinar to address many of these questions, as well as others supplied by attendees.

Covid-19: Towards the new normal, and beyond...

Renee DiResta, technical research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory, discusses a possible executive order U.S. President Trump is proposing after his tweets were fact-checked. She speaks with Bloomberg's Emily Chang.

President's Reaction to Twitter Fact Check Is 'Slapped Together,' Says Stanford's DiResta

10.31234/osf.io/28vsj

As a call to action in the field, we highlight that the COVID-19 pandemic is an abrupt and chronic stressor to children and families of disadvantaged and marginalized backgrounds. Critically, this global crisis has a disproportionate impact on the physical, mental and behavioral health of these vulnerable members of society, due to pre-existing disadvantages such as economic hardship, educational inequities, risks of maltreatment and community violence. A lack of access to mental health support further deprives children and their caregivers of the resources needed to cope with magnified adversities during the pandemic. We believe these inequalities are not the mere result of the pandemic, but enduring issues in society that are detrimental to the wellbeing of the most vulnerable. We advocate for long-term strategies to change societal structures that oppress marginalized children and families, and believe the pandemic reflects a pressing need to invest in interventions.