This study investigates the long-term effectiveness of active psychological inoculation as a means to build resistance against misinformation. Using 3 longitudinal experiments (2 preregistered), we tested the effectiveness of Bad News, a real-world intervention in which participants develop resistance against misinformation through exposure to weakened doses of misinformation techniques. In 3 experiments (NExp1 = 151, NExp2 = 194, NExp3 = 170), participants played either Bad News (inoculation group) or Tetris (gamified control group) and rated the reliability of news headlines that either used a misinformation technique or not. We found that participants rate fake news as significantly less reliable after the intervention. In Experiment 1, we assessed participants at regular intervals to explore the longevity of this effect and found that the inoculation effect remains stable for at least 3 months. In Experiment 2, we sought to replicate these findings without regular testing and found significant decay over a 2-month time period so that the long-term inoculation effect was no longer significant. In Experiment 3, we replicated the inoculation effect and investigated whether long-term effects could be due to item-response memorization or the fake-to-real ratio of items presented, but found that this is not the case. We discuss implications for inoculation theory and psychological research on misinformation.

10.1037/xap0000315

Long-term effectiveness of inoculation against misinformation: Three longitudinal experiments.

3. and how is this not going to end in a decade of law suits? 4. finally (really first): get well soon!

never seen before in my life time... 2. I continue to struggle to understand what has happened to the legal frameworks that have governed working in higher education for the last decade. How did we get from health & safety assessments for lab based psych exp. to F2F teaching now

point being made here that is relevant more generally not just to high stakes decisions involving the well-being of others, but to paths we need to pursue in order to improve the quality of our public discourse, in particular on social media where 'talk is cheap' in ways I've ..

1. as someone who worked on argumentation in the 'beforetime' (speaking as Ulrike Hahn here), I have been very interested in the role of *tying claims to own behaviour* in the context of argument quality and argument evaluation and I think there is a deep..

retweeting this because it raises many wider issues: 1/5

Just had a positive coronavirus diagnosis. I was infected *in* a seminar. Open invitation: any university “leader” who still thinks F2F teaching is safe, come round mine. We can sit 2m apart in my bedroom, I’ll pop a mask on, and we can discuss it for two hours. Any takers?

A quarter of Philadelphia residents know someone who has died of COVID-19, half the population has struggled to pay bills or has had other financial hardship, 40% have lost work or wages, and more than half worry they could catch the coronavirus at work. Those are some of the results of a new Pew survey of 1,025 Philadelphians about the unprecedented year and its overlapping pressures — the pandemic, racial justice protests, gun violence, and the economic downturn.

1 in 4 Philadelphians knows someone who has died of COVID-19, and nearly half have lost jobs or wages, Pew study says

The U.S.’s economic scarring from the pandemic is much less severe than initially feared, Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s economics team said in a note that offered an upbeat take on America’s situation.

Goldman Offers Less-Dire View of Pandemic’s U.S. Economic Damage

Concerns about the safety and effectiveness of possible vaccine, pace of approval process

U.S. Public Now Divided Over Whether To Get COVID-19 Vaccine

COVID-19 Is Now the Third Leading Cause of Death in the U.S.

It kills more people than the flu, contrary to Trump’s claims, and also surpasses stroke, Alzheimer’s and diabetes

Python-igraph 0.8.3

python-igraph 0.8.3, the third release the 0.8 series is now available. You can install it from PyPI 1 where we provide precompiled wheels for Python 3.6 to 3.9 on Linux, macOS and Windows. You can find the source code 1 if you want to compile it on your own.

One-third of Toronto’s community outbreaks related to bars and restaurants, says new COVID-19 data

2010.04014

The constituents of a complex system exchange information to function properly. Their signalling dynamics often leads to the appearance of emergent phenomena, such as phase transitions and collective behaviors. While information exchange has been widely modeled by means of distinct spreading processes -- such as continuous-time diffusion, random walks, synchronization and consensus -- on top of complex networks, a unified and physically-grounded framework to study information dynamics and gain insights about the macroscopic effects of microscopic interactions, is still eluding us. In this article, we present this framework in terms of a statistical field theory of information dynamics, unifying a range of dynamical processes governing the evolution of information on top of static or time varying structures. We show that information operators form a meaningful statistical ensemble and their superposition defines a density matrix that can be used for the analysis of complex dynamics. As a direct application, we show that the von Neumann entropy of the ensemble can be a measure of the functional diversity of complex systems, defined in terms of the functional differentiation of higher-order interactions among their components. Our results suggest that modularity and hierarchy, two key features of empirical complex systems -- from the human brain to social and urban networks -- play a key role to guarantee functional diversity and, consequently, are favored.

Statistical physics of complex information dynamics

Fran Baum and Sharon Friel recently proposed the need for a social as well as a biological vaccine to solve the challenge of COVID-19. They argued in the Medical Journal of Australiathat we need to go beyond a biomedical vision for solving this syndemic. By a social vaccine, they mean “a metaphor designed to shift the dominant biomedical orientation of the health sector towards the underlying distal factors that cause disease and suffering”.

Offline: Reasons for hope

Outside Parliament, an orchestra of 400 musicians perform 20% of Holst's 'Mars' to highlight the lack of support offered by the government to freelancers within creative industries during the COVID-19 crisis.

10.1038/s41467-020-17785-2

Decision makers must have sufficient confidence in models if they are to influence their decisions. We propose three screening questions to critically evaluate models with respect to their purpose, organization, and evidence. They enable a more transparent, robust, and secure use of model outputs.

Three questions to ask before using model outputs for decision support

Despite documented public support for pandemic response strategies across the WHO European Region, Member States are reporting signs of pandemic fatigue in their populations – here defined as demotivation to follow recommended protective behaviours, emerging gradually over time and affected by a number of emotions, experiences and perceptions. Responding to a request from Member States for support in this field, this document provides a framework for the planning and implementation of national and subnational strategies to maintain and reinvigorate public support to prevent COVID-19.Pandemic fatigue is an expected and natural response to a prolonged public health crisis – not least because the severity and scale of the COVID-19 pandemic have called for the implementation of invasive measures with unprecedented impacts on the daily lives of everyone, including those who have not been directly affected by the virus itself.

Pandemic fatigue

10.1038/d41586-020-02774-8

History must not repeat itself — global and continental cooperation are essential.

COVID-19 vaccines: how to ensure Africa has access

An Editorial1The Lancet Infectious DiseasesThe COVID-19 infodemic.Lancet Infect Dis. 2020; 20: 875Summary Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (0) Google Scholar published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases addressed the COVID-19 infodemic. An infodemic is described by WHO as an “overabundance of information—some accurate and some not—that occurs during an epidemic”,2WHOInfodemic management—infodemiology.https://www.who.int/teams/risk-communication/infodemic-managementDate: 2020Date accessed: August 4, 2020Google Scholar and WHO is dealing with this issue proactively.3Tangcharoensathien V Calleja N Nguyen T et al.Framework for managing the COVID-19 infodemic: methods and results of an online, crowdsourced WHO technical consultation.J Med Internet Res. 2020; 22e19659Crossref PubMed Scopus (4) Google Scholar The UN is also focusing on misinformation in connection with COVID-19, stating that misinformation is a virus and launching an initiative called Verified “to provide content that cuts through the noise to deliver life-saving information, fact-based advice and stories from the best of humanity”.4

10.1016/S1473-3099(20)30721-0

COVID-19: the deadly threat of misinformation

2010.02188

Social contagion is a well-studied phenomenon in which people adopt beliefs that they are exposed to by their neighbors, and then pass those beliefs along to others. Research (and daily life) shows that people prefer to adopt beliefs that are consistent with those they already hold. However, scholars do not often account for interactions between beliefs in their models of social contagion. Instead, they assume that beliefs spread independently of one another. Is this a harmless simplification? Or does omitting interdependence between beliefs suppress important dynamics, and change the outcome of social contagion? This paper performs a head-to-head comparison between independent and interdependent diffusion. Simulations identify two social processes that emerge when diffusants interact, and predict that as a result of interdependent diffusion, worldviews will emerge that are unconstrained by external truth, and polarization will develop in homogenous populations. A controlled laboratory experiment confirms these predictions with 2400 participants in 120 artificial social networks. I conclude that the assumption of independence between diffusants is not as universally appropriate as its ubiquity would suggest. Instead, interdependence between diffusants is likely to be both common and consequential.

Interdependent Diffusion: The social contagion of interacting beliefs

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that ignorance or political influence of scientifically grounded health policies does not pay off.1The LancetPolitical casualties of the COVID-19 pandemic.Lancet Infect Dis. 2020; 20: 755Summary Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (0) Google Scholar Germany's COVID-19 response is evaluated as reasoned and scientifically grounded; however, it has exposed undue political influence on national scientific guidelines due to migration policy concerns.

10.1016/S0140-6736(20)32081-X

Power of and power over COVID-19 response guidelines

10.1038/d41586-020-02798-0

Slow-lane logistics shouldn’t stymie fast-track science, says head of UK government’s Vaccine Taskforce.

Plan now to speed vaccine supply for future pandemics

doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.102.042303

Modeling efforts in opinion dynamics have to a large extent ignored that opinion exchange between individuals can also have an effect on how willing they are to express their opinion publicly. Here, we introduce a model of public opinion expression. Two groups of agents with different opinion on an issue interact with each other, changing the willingness to express their opinion according to whether they perceive themselves as part of the majority or minority opinion. We formulate the model as a multigroup majority game and investigate the Nash equilibria. We also provide a dynamical systems perspective: Using the reinforcement learning algorithm of Q<math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mi>Q</mi></math>-learning, we reduce the N<math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mi>N</mi></math>-agent system in a mean-field approach to two dimensions which represent the two opinion groups. This two-dimensional system is analyzed in a comprehensive bifurcation analysis of its parameters. The model identifies social-structural conditions for public opinion predominance of different groups. Among other findings, we show under which circumstances a minority can dominate public discourse.

Dynamics of opinion expression

These data indicated how much more severe COVID19 is for those over 35 when compared to flu.

To date, roughly 90 British universities have reported coronavirus cases. Thousands of students are confined to their halls, some in suites with infected classmates, and many are struggling to get tested. The government, fearful of students seeding outbreaks far from campus, has warned that they may need to quarantine before returning home for Christmas.

.conflating a heterogeneously motived "outcome" with a psychological construct is a terrible example of conflating redescription with "theory" (a cardinal sin in psych. even where those outcomes are, unlike here, very narrowly defined) ..rant over...

those include changed risk perception, lack of trust, changed societal cost, divergent views on best policy - everything! that's as much (and as little) a behavioural science concept as "beer sales have dropped" across countries 3/4

"pandemic fatigue" (wording matters!) is simply defined here as the resultant *outcome* (behaviour) namely: "demotivation to follow recommended protective behaviours, emerging gradually over time and affected by a number of emotions, experiences and perceptions" 2/4

2 issues: 1) the behavioural scientists involved at the time have since clarified they never pushed 'behavioural fatigue" as a thing at the time, so whatever this is, it should not serve to rewrite that history and 2) this is not your standard behavioural science concept... 1/4

Across the WHO European Region, Member States are reporting signs of pandemic fatigue in their populations – here defined as demotivation to follow recommended protective behaviours, emerging gradually over time and affected by a number of emotions, experiences and perceptions.Responding to a request from Member States for support in this field, this framework document provides key considerations for the planning and implementation of national and subnational strategies to maintain and reinvigorate public support to prevent COVID-19.

Pandemic fatigue - Reinvigorating the public to prevent COVID-19, September 2020 (produced by WHO/Europe)

10.1038/s41586-020-2342-5

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), a novel coronavirus with high nucleotide identity to SARS-CoV and to SARS-related coronaviruses that have been detected in horseshoe bats, has spread across the world and had a global effect on healthcare systems and economies1,2. A suitable small animal model is needed to support the development of vaccines and therapies. Here we report the pathogenesis and transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 in golden (Syrian) hamsters (Mesocricetus auratus). Immunohistochemistry assay demonstrated the presence of viral antigens in nasal mucosa, bronchial epithelial cells and areas of lung consolidation on days 2 and 5 after inoculation with SARS-CoV-2, followed by rapid viral clearance and pneumocyte hyperplasia at 7 days after inoculation. We also found viral antigens in epithelial cells of the duodenum, and detected viral RNA in faeces. Notably, SARS-CoV-2 was transmitted efficiently from inoculated hamsters to naive hamsters by direct contact and via aerosols. Transmission via fomites in soiled cages was not as efficient. Although viral RNA was continuously detected in the nasal washes of inoculated hamsters for 14 days, the communicable period was short and correlated with the detection of infectious virus but not viral RNA. Inoculated and naturally infected hamsters showed apparent weight loss on days 6–7 post-inoculation or post-contact; all hamsters returned to their original weight within 14 days and developed neutralizing antibodies. Our results suggest that features associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection in golden hamsters resemble those found in humans with mild SARS-CoV-2 infections.

Pathogenesis and transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in golden hamsters

The pandemic caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has reached nearly every country in the world with extraordinary person-to-person transmission. The most likely original source of the virus was spillover from an animal reservoir and subsequent adaptation to humans sometime during the winter of 2019 in Wuhan Province, China. Because of its genetic similarity to SARS-CoV-1, it is probable that this novel virus has a similar host range and receptor specificity. Due to concern for human–pet transmission, we investigated the susceptibility of domestic cats and dogs to infection and potential for infected cats to transmit to naive cats. We report that cats are highly susceptible to infection, with a prolonged period of oral and nasal viral shedding that is not accompanied by clinical signs, and are capable of direct contact transmission to other cats. These studies confirm that cats are susceptible to productive SARS-CoV-2 infection, but are unlikely to develop clinical disease. Further, we document that cats developed a robust neutralizing antibody response that prevented reinfection following a second viral challenge. Conversely, we found that dogs do not shed virus following infection but do seroconvert and mount an antiviral neutralizing antibody response. There is currently no evidence that cats or dogs play a significant role in human infection; however, reverse zoonosis is possible if infected owners expose their domestic pets to the virus during acute infection. Resistance to reinfection holds promise that a vaccine strategy may protect cats and, by extension, humans.

10.1073/pnas.2013102117

Experimental infection of domestic dogs and cats with SARS-CoV-2: Pathogenesis, transmission, and response to reexposure in cats

It rather looks likely that 10k cases (likely markedly more) cannot have been notified to the individuals OR referred in to T&T for contact tracing and isolation. Much more information would be v. helpful indeed. Which groups of people affected? Schools? Students? Care Homes

Steady climb upwards for patients in hospital. 2329 for England alone, (up 135 since Sat & up 334 since Thursday) Expect c 450 more A slower for ventilation (to be expected especially as it is not being used as first defence any more, favouring CPAP and drug intervention)

Today we only have data for England and Wales for admissions and that was for Friday..and these data often lag. 465. The last day when we had all 4 nations report was last Tuesday (422) The numbers are not shooting up. Uncertain to what extent that is lag or a steadying.

Then there is the question of what happens to tests too old to process, given there appears to be a log jam? How many are voided or unclear? Or how many were processed bu not recorded as such? We really need to know.

Checking positives by specimen date (ie when swabbed). Remember these tend to be quite a lag on these, esp Pillar 2. So expect the most recent days to increase quite a bit. But we can see 8.5k already on Thursday. 9.5k on Wednesday. C 8.5k Mon and Tues of last week

. Brace yourself. 22,961 new cases. More later.

Event organiser praises ‘indomitable spirit’ of competitorsCurtailed race will still raise tens of millions for charities

'Strangest ever' London Marathon is a virtual hit with 43,000 runners

Queen Elizabeth says national and local journalism is ‘important public service’

Queen stresses need for trusted news sources during Covid crisis

Few staff say they intend to return to their offices five days a week

Covid-19 has changed working patterns for good, UK survey finds

We need discussions about what measures should look like, and what is feasible/sustainable. But we also need to frame any discussions around the actual dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 as a contagious disease, not under simplistic assumptions about control vs cases. 6/6

First, it means less COVID burden in terms of hospitalisations and deaths. And second, it means more capacity to use targeted measures (e.g. test & trace) to keep transmission down, which in turn could allow other types of measures to be relaxed. 5/

If control measures are keeping cases flat at 10k per day (for example), those same measures would also keep things flat if cases were at lower level. In fact, given a choice of R=1 and a high or low infection level, there are two benefits to going for the low option... 4/

But of course, this isn’t how infectious diseases work. If control measures are relaxed so that R is above 1, we’d expect cases - and hospitalisations - to continue to grow and grow until something changes (e.g. control reintroduced, behaviour shifts, immunity accumulated). 3/

If discussions are framed around the assumption of a simple inverse relationship between control and cases, it can lead to erroneous claims that if cases/hospitalisations are low, control measures can be relaxed and case counts will simply plateau at some higher level. 2/

I often see the misconception that control measures directly scale COVID case numbers (e.g. “hospitalisations are low so measures should be relaxed”). But in reality, measures scale *transmission* and transmission in turn influences cases. Why is this distinction important? 1/

Research into antibodies could explain children’s protection against disease, or why virus causes life-threatening effects

Scientists study whether immune response wards off or worsens Covid

This chapter summarizes and critically addresses the evolution of risk communication approaches through the lens of ethical issues. The growth and the consolidation of risk communication as an independent, cross-cutting discipline appear to be strictly connected to the growing concern for both public's and individual recipients' needs and rights.A first step is to establish what kind of legitimate needs and rights are eligible to be addressed, recognizing that it's not up to risk communicators to decide what people need to know, since they can autonomously assess their information needs and their preference. Academics and researchers should provide specialized scientific and technical knowledge and make it publicly available and comprehensible to allow government, agencies and communities to improve their ability to cope with risks (WMO, 2018). It follows that the first duty of risk communicators is to disclose scientifically sound information, providing open access and make it available and understandable (Baram, 1984).

10.1144/SP508-2020-104

From “good” intuitions to principled practices and beyond: ethical issues in risk communication

Job growth has slowed in recent months

September Jobs Report Shows Slowdown in Recovery

Our weekly round-up of the best psychology coverage from elsewhere on the web

Conspiracy Theories And Winter Wellbeing: The Week’s Best Psychology Links

10.1103/PhysRevE.102.042302

Many real-world complex networks arise as a result of a competition between growth and rewiring processes. Usually the initial part of the evolution is dominated by growth while the later one rather by rewiring. The initial growth allows the network to reach a certain size while rewiring to optimize its function and topology. As a model example we consider tree networks which first grow in a stochastic process of node attachment and then age in a stochastic process of local topology changes. The ageing is implemented as a Markov process that preserves the node-degree distribution. We quantify differences between the initial and aged network topologies and study the dynamics of the evolution. We implement two versions of the ageing dynamics. One is based on reshuffling of leaves and the other on reshuffling of branches. The latter one generates much faster ageing due to nonlocal nature of changes.

Ageing of complex networks