Latest news with #socialscientists
New York Times
6 days ago
- General
- New York Times
Always Late? Blame Your Time Personality.
Early in their relationship, before they married, Anne Kelsh was working from home and enjoying making dinner for her partner — what she called 'the fun of the domestic role.' He told her he'd like to eat when he got home at 6 p.m. That was a bit on the early side for Ms. Kelsh, but she was willing to accommodate — until she eventually realized that 'when he said 6 o'clock, he meant 6 on the dot.' For her, the time was more like a suggestion. '8 o'clock is the time the curtain goes up at a show, and you must be there for 8 o'clock,' she said. 'But dinner — it's dinner. It's dinner in our own house. I could not understand that sense of rigidity.' Punctuality became a constant source of friction. Ms. Kelsh, who had struggled all her life with getting things done on time, used to say, 'I married you, I didn't join the army.' Meanwhile, her husband was frequently bothered by her inability to arrive promptly to appointments and gatherings, a habit he considered rude. Arguments about punctuality are common, but experts say they are often really about something else entirely: the different ways we relate to time. Social scientists have worked for the better part of a century to understand our varying approaches to the clock. In the 1950s, the anthropologist Edward T. Hall coined the terms 'monochronic' and 'polychronic' to describe different cultural attitudes to time management. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
07-07-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Misinformation lends itself to social contagion – here's how to recognize and combat it
In 2019, a rare and shocking event in the Malaysian peninsula town of Ketereh grabbed international headlines. Nearly 40 girls age 12 to 18 from a religious school had been screaming inconsolably, claiming to have seen a 'face of pure evil,' complete with images of blood and gore. Experts believe that the girls suffered what is known as a mass psychogenic illness, a psychological condition that results in physical symptoms and spreads socially – much like a virus. I'm a social and behavioral scientist within the field of public health. I study the ways in which individual behavior is influenced by prevailing social norms and social network processes, across a wide range of behaviors and contexts. Part of my work involves figuring out how to combat the spread of harmful content that can shape our behavior for the worse, such as misinformation. Mass psychogenic illness is not misinformation, but it gives researchers like me some idea about how misinformation spreads. Social connections establish pathways of influence that can facilitate the spread of germs, mental illness and even behaviors. We can be profoundly influenced by others within our social networks, for better or for worse. Researchers in my field think of social norms as perceptions of how common and how approved a specific behavior is within a specific network of people who matter to us. These perceptions may not always reflect reality, such as when people overestimate or underestimate how common their viewpoint is within a group. But they can influence our behavior nonetheless. For many, perception is reality. Social norms and related behaviors can spread through social networks like a virus can, but with one crucial caveat. Viruses often require just one contact with a potential host to spread, whereas behaviors often require multiple contacts to spread. This phenomenon, known as complex contagion, highlights how socially learned behaviors take time to embed. Consider a familiar scenario: the return of baggy jeans to the fashion zeitgeist. For many millennials like me, you may react to a friend engaging in this resurrected trend by cringing and lightly teasing them. Yet, after seeing them don those denim parachutes on multiple occasions, a brazen thought may emerge: 'Hmm, maybe they don't look that bad. I could probably pull those off.' That's complex contagion at work. This dynamic is even more evident on social media. One of my former students expressed this succinctly. She was looking at an Instagram post about Astro Boy Boots – red, oversize boots based on those worn by a 1952 Japanese cartoon character. Her initial skepticism quickly faded upon reading the comments. As she put it, 'I thought they were ugly at first, but after reading the comments, I guess they're kind of fire.' Moving from innocuous examples, consider the spread of misinformation on social media. Misinformation is false information that is spread unintentionally, while disinformation is false information that is intentionally disseminated to deceive or do serious harm. Research shows that both misinformation and disinformation spread faster and farther than truth online. This means that before people can muster the resources to debunk the false information that has seeped into their social networks, they may have already lost the race. Complex contagion may have taken hold, in a malicious way, and begun spreading falsehood throughout the network at a rapid pace. People spread false information for various reasons, such as to advance their personal agenda or narrative, which can lead to echo chambers that filter out accurate information contrary to one's own views. Even when people do not intend to spread false information online, doing so tends to happen because of a lack of attention paid to accuracy or lower levels of digital media literacy. So how much can people do about this? One way to combat harmful contagion is to draw on an idea first used in the 1960s called pre-bunking. The idea is to train people to practice skills to spot and resist misinformation and disinformation on a smaller scale before they're exposed to the real thing. The idea is akin to vaccines that build immunity through exposure to a weakened form of the disease-causing germ. The idea is for someone to be exposed to a limited amount of false information, say through the pre-bunking with Google quiz. They then learn to spot common manipulation tactics used in false information and learn how to resist their influence with evidence-based strategies to counter the falsehoods. This could also be done using a trained facilitator within classrooms, workplaces or other groups, including virtual communities. Then, the idea is to gradually repeat the process with larger doses of false information and further counterarguments. By role-playing and practicing the counterarguments, this resistance skills training provides a sort of psychological innoculation against misinformation and disinformation, at least temporarily. Importantly, this approach is intended for someone who has not yet been exposed to false information – hence, pre-bunking rather than debunking. If we want to engage with someone who firmly believes in their stance, particularly when it runs contrary to our own, behavioral scientists recommend leading with empathy and nonjudgmentally exchanging narratives. Debunking is difficult work, however, and even strong debunking messages can result in the persistence of misinformation. You may not change the other person's mind, but you may be able to engage in a civil discussion and avoid pushing them further away from your position. When everyday people apply this with their friends and loved ones, they can train people to recognize the telltale signs of false information. This might be recognizing what's known as a false dichotomy – for instance, 'either you support this bill or you HATE our country.' Another signal of false information is the common tactic of scapegoating: 'Oil industry faces collapse due to rise in electric car ownership.' And another is the slippery slope of logical fallacy. An example is 'legalization of marijuana will lead to everyone using heroin.' All of these are examples of common tactics that spread misinformation and come from a Practical Guide to Pre-Bunking Misinformation, created by a collaborative team from the University of Cambridge, BBC Media Action and Jigsaw, an interdisciplinary think tank within Google. This approach is not only effective in combating misinformation and disinformation, but also in delaying or preventing the onset of harmful behaviors. My own research suggests that pre-bunking can be used effectively to delay the initiation of tobacco use among adolescents. But it only works with regular 'booster shots' of training, or the effect fades away in a matter of months or less. Many researchers like me who study these social contagion dynamics don't yet know the best way to keep these 'booster shots' going in people's lives. But there are recent studies showing that it can be done. A promising line of research also suggests that a group-based approach can be effective in maintaining the pre-bunking effects to achieve psychological herd immunity. Personally, I would bet my money on group-based approaches where you, your friends or your family can mutually reinforce each other's capacity to resist harmful social norms entering your network. Simply put, if multiple members of your social network have strong resistance skills, then your group has a better chance of resisting the incursion of harmful norms and behaviors into your network than if it's just you resisting alone. Other people matter. In the end, whether we're empowering people to resist the insidious creep of online falsehoods or equipping adolescents to stand firm against peer pressure to smoke or use other substances, the research is clear: Resistance skills training can provide an essential weapon for safeguarding ourselves and young people from harmful behaviors. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Shaon Lahiri, College of Charleston Read more: Game theory explains why reasonable parents make vaccine choices that fuel outbreaks I'm a physician who has looked at hundreds of studies of vaccine safety, and here's some of what RFK Jr. gets wrong Using TikTok could be making you more politically polarized, new study finds Shaon Lahiri does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The Herald
20-06-2025
- Politics
- The Herald
Time to go back to the drawing board on early childhood education
What type of society is this? What have our priorities been for the past 30 years, especially in the education sector? Where have we been? Social scientists and educational psychologists opine that the human brain is the last organ to develop to its fullest potential. Research indicates that it takes 20 years for the brain to get to the point where it is fully developed, meaning that the work that is done to develop the child from adolescence to early adulthood is of vital importance to engender a culture of meaning, purpose and ultimately a drive to succeed. If you miss it then, forget about the potential you will derive from the adult who has been neglected from the early years. Is it surprising that we have the challenges that we face in SA? Rising crime rates, homelessness, unemployment and general helplessness have come to define the experiences of many in our society. The question we ought to ask is what is being done to instill the right focus on early education to ensure we have better results in the future. This is not only about demonstrating how we benchmark ourselves against other nations on literacy and education. It's also about fulfilling an agenda set by the June 16 generation to create a country and a people that will hold their heads high and take their rightful place among the community of nations. A key challenge that most researchers point to is the absence of cognitive attention among our children at the age they are when they take these tests. This refers to the slow cognitive development experienced by a majority of our children in that age group. Studies such as the University of Pretoria's point to a lack of teaching skills among educators who teach at those levels, the absence of parental involvement in the education of their children and other socioeconomic challenges as the major causes of these challenges. My own assessment is that we generally don't have a vision as a country when it comes to defining the society that we want. SA's budget for basic education far exceeds that of many developing nations that face similar challenges. The results, however, are far short of those achieved in some of those countries.
