During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jay Van Bavel, a psychologist at New York University, wanted to identify the social factors that best predict a person’s support for public-health measures, such as physical distancing or closing restaurants. He had a handful of collaborators ready to collect survey data. But because the pandemic was going on everywhere, he wondered whether he could scale up the project. So he tried something he’d never done before.
For example, with the technology that’s now tried and tested, Van Bavel says, it’s much easier to build an international team. “Now that we’ve got the infrastructure and experience, we’ll be able to do this for all kinds of things,” he says. Preliminary research suggests that aligning the message with recipients’ values or highlighting social approval can also be influential. Michele Gelfand, a psychologist at the University of Maryland in College Park, is part of a team running an ‘intervention tournament’ to identify ways of promoting mask wearing among conservatives and liberals in the United States.
The findings were almost immediately put to work by researchers seeking to increase COVID-19 vaccination uptake. Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles , tried replicating the strategy among people being treated at the UCLA Health system in February and March, and found that it “proved quite useful for nudging COVID-19 vaccination”, Milkman says.
The research possibilities opened up by geotracking are “beyond my dreams”, says Walter Quattrociocchi, a data scientist at the Ca’Foscari University of Venice, Italy. “We have so much more data to measure social processes now,” he says, and the pandemic has provided a way to put these data to work.
It’s a wonderful, unexpected IQ test against an incredibly large portion of humanity. Astonishing results, which will allow biologists and anthropologists to rethink their beliefs.
I hope it includes the Pavlovian effect and medias influence.