Could Distributed Peer Review Better Decide Grant Funding?
The landscape of academic grant funding is notoriously competitive and plagued by lengthy, bureaucratic processes, exacerbated by difficulties in finding willing reviewers. Distributed […]
The Irrationality of Risk Calculations
David Canter considers how it is that people judge vaccination related risks so bizarrely.
Creating ‘Psychological Vaccine’ to Protect Against Fake COVID News
Our work in recent years has focused on how to prevent people from falling for misinformation in the first place, building on a framework from social psychology known as inoculation theory.
Start Talking Now About Life After Jabs Make COVID Less Deadly Than the Flu
The reports from Britain’s hospitals in the last few days have been truly worrying. No one should doubt the reality of what […]
Controlling the COVID-19 Pandemic Hinges on Behavior
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused extraordinary devastation, claiming millions of lives and disrupting the economy and daily life across the globe. From […]
When Ignorance is Anything But Bliss
David Canter considers the tragic implications of people not understanding what they are told by politicians and experts.
Trying to Lock Down Until COVID is Eradicated Would Be Dangerous Folly
It is possible that we could abolish death by COVID, argues Robert Dingwall, by continuing the restrictions of 2020 indefinitely – the problem, of course, is that we would simply die from something else.
Why Does Social Science Not Bite?
David Canter considers why the social sciences failed to influence behavior in order to stop the spread of COVID-19. The virologists had been preparing for a new virus for some years, so were already ahead of the game when they had to start creating a new vaccine. What preparations had social psychologists, sociologists or anthropologists for the inevitable emergence of a new pandemic?
Heidi Larson on Vaccine Skepticism
As the toll from the COVID-19 pandemic increased, polling suggests counter-intuitively that resistance to a future vaccine has also risen. Anthropologist Heidi J. Larson identified several likely drivers of this, including scientists themselves.
