- Banned
- #1
I have spent much of my career studying ways to blunt the effects of disinformation and help the public make sense of the complexities of politics and science. When my colleagues and I probed the relation between the consumption of misinformation and the embrace, or dismissal, of protective behaviors that will ultimately stop the coronavirus’s spread, the results were clear: Those who believe false ideas and conspiracy theories about COVID-19 and vaccines are less likely to engage in mask wearing, social distancing, hand washing and vaccination.
snip
Geezus!
It matters how we respond in these moments. As Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall wrote in this magazine in 2019, the “social transmission of knowledge is at the heart of culture and science.” In a large-scale online social network experiment conducted in 2018, Doug Guilbeault and Damon Centola, both then at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, confirmed that power. When smokers and nonsmokers collaboratively evaluated antismoking messages, the smokers were more likely to acknowledge the harms of tobacco use than the smokers who evaluated the messages on their own. Similarly Sally Chan and Dolores Albarracin of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and I found that the level of Twitter chatter from November 2018 through February 2019 about “vaccine fraud” in the counties of our roughly 3,000 panelists were associated with negative attitudes and lower rates of flu vaccination among them later in the year. But those worrisome effects did not occur among people who reported discussing vaccines with family and friends.
I swear to my time. Anyone with a key board and internet connection is now fully informed and A Science Communicator?! Holy shit! Batman!
How to Debunk Misinformation about COVID, Vaccines and Masks
We each have more power to be a science communicator than we realize
Science? Maybe. Perhaps. But when opinion pretending to be science and cherry picking evidence then obviously the opinion is being communicated- not just the science- anyone recall the Hockey Stick science?
Good lord people! Wake the fuck up-
snip
Geezus!
It matters how we respond in these moments. As Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall wrote in this magazine in 2019, the “social transmission of knowledge is at the heart of culture and science.” In a large-scale online social network experiment conducted in 2018, Doug Guilbeault and Damon Centola, both then at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, confirmed that power. When smokers and nonsmokers collaboratively evaluated antismoking messages, the smokers were more likely to acknowledge the harms of tobacco use than the smokers who evaluated the messages on their own. Similarly Sally Chan and Dolores Albarracin of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and I found that the level of Twitter chatter from November 2018 through February 2019 about “vaccine fraud” in the counties of our roughly 3,000 panelists were associated with negative attitudes and lower rates of flu vaccination among them later in the year. But those worrisome effects did not occur among people who reported discussing vaccines with family and friends.
I swear to my time. Anyone with a key board and internet connection is now fully informed and A Science Communicator?! Holy shit! Batman!
How to Debunk Misinformation about COVID, Vaccines and Masks
We each have more power to be a science communicator than we realize
Science? Maybe. Perhaps. But when opinion pretending to be science and cherry picking evidence then obviously the opinion is being communicated- not just the science- anyone recall the Hockey Stick science?
Good lord people! Wake the fuck up-