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Language can exert a strong influence on human behaviour. In experimental studies, it is for example well-known that the framing of an experiment or priming at the beginning of an experiment can alter participants' behaviour. However, few…
Affective polarization and political sorting drive public antagonism around issues at the science-policy nexus. Looking at the COVID-19 period, we study cross-domain spillover of incivility and contentiousness in public engagements with…
If agents engage in motivated reasoning, how does that affect the aggregation of information in society? We study the effects of motivated reasoning in two canonical settings - the Condorcet jury theorem (CJT), and the sequential social…
The emergence of global health crises, such as COVID-19 and Monkeypox (mpox), has underscored the importance of understanding public sentiment to inform effective public health strategies. This study conducts a comparative sentiment…
Large-scale hazards affect societies not only through direct physical impacts but also through emotions that spread across populations. Fueled by social amplification and networked communication, collective emotions often diverge markedly…
Societal responses to environmental change vary widely, even under comparable shocks, reflecting differences in both policy measures and public reactions shaped by cultural and socioeconomic contexts. We examine mask-wearing dynamics across…
The COVID-19 pandemic brought upon a massive wave of disinformation, exacerbating polarization in the increasingly divided landscape of online discourse. In this context, popular social media users play a major role, as they have the…
Political "circuses" may undermine democratic accountability if leaders facing scandal can reliably pull media coverage toward fresh topics and away from substantive investigations or evaluations. We investigate whether politicians…
As the COVID-19 pandemic evolved, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) used Twitter to disseminate safety guidance and updates, reaching millions of users. This study analyzes two years of tweets from, to, and about the CDC…
Governments are increasingly turning to algorithmic risk assessments when making important decisions, such as whether to release criminal defendants before trial. Policymakers assert that providing public servants with algorithmic advice…
This paper makes four scientific contributions to the area of misinformation detection and analysis on digital platforms, with a specific focus on investigating how conspiracy theories, fake remedies, and false reports emerge, propagate,…
During the COVID-19 pandemic, it became evident that the effectiveness of applying intervention measures is significantly influenced by societal acceptance, which, in turn, is affected by the processes of opinion formation. This article…
The time-changing nature of our world demands processing of huge amounts of information in fast and reliable way to generate successful behaviors. Therefore, significant brain resources are devoted to process spatiotemporal information.…
Recent debates over adults' theory of mind use have been fueled by surprising failures of perspective-taking in communication, suggesting that perspective-taking can be relatively effortful. How, then, should speakers and listeners allocate…
We investigate how crises alter societies by analyzing the timing and channels of change using a longitudinal multi-wave survey of a representative sample of Americans throughout 2020. This methodology allows us to overcome some of the…
Effective response to pandemics requires coordinated adoption of mitigation measures, like masking and quarantines, to curb a virus's spread. However, as the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated, political divisions can hinder consensus on the…
Contagion, a concept from epidemiology, has long been used to characterize social influence on people's behavior and affective (emotional) states. While it has revealed many useful insights, it is not clear whether the contagion metaphor is…
We provide an insight into the open data resources pertinent to the study of the spread of Covid-19 pandemic and its control. We identify the variables required to analyze fundamental aspects like seasonal behaviour, regional mortality…
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed significant weaknesses in the healthcare information system. The overwhelming volume of misinformation on social media and other socioeconomic factors created extraordinary challenges to motivate people to take…
Vaccine adverse events have been presumed to be a relatively objective measure that is immune to political polarization. The real-world data, however, shows the correlation between presidential disapproval ratings and the subjective…