Credit: University of Cambridge
A short online game designed to fight conspiracies about COVID-19 boosts people s confidence in detecting misinformation by increasing their ability to perceive its manipulativeness compared to genuine news, according to a study.
Go Viral!, developed by the University of Cambridge s Social Decision-Making Lab in partnership with the UK Cabinet Office and media agency DROG, was launched last autumn as part of the UK government s efforts to tackle coronavirus falsehoods circulating online.
The five-minute game puts people in the shoes of a purveyor of fake pandemic news, encouraging players to create panic by spreading misinformation about COVID-19 using social media - all within the confines of the game.
Quick: Pick your three favorite fast-food restaurants.
If you re like many people, McDonald s, Wendy s, and Burger King may come to mind even if you much prefer In-N-Out or Chick-fil-A.
A new study from UC Berkeley s Haas School of Business and UC San Francisco s Department of Neurology found that when it comes to making choices, we surprisingly often forget about the things we like best and are swayed by what we remember. The paper, publishing this week in the journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, combines insights from economics and psychology with decision-making experiments and fMRI brain scans to examine how our imperfect memories affect our decision making.
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CATONSVILLE, MD, May 4, 2021 - Paid video streaming services on your television, smart phone or other devices are increasingly replacing traditional video entertainment platforms of cable, satellite and broadcast TV. The growth of these services, known in the industry as over-the-top (OTT) media services, may be accompanied by a rise in pirated content, particularly where access to those services may be restricted, a group of researchers has found.
The researchers studied the effects of the Netflix - one of the leading global companies in paid video streaming - and its growth in 40 Asian countries. They also studied one country where access to Netflix was restricted, which is where they found that the search for pirated content increased.
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COLUMBUS, Ohio - If you really want to understand literature, don t start with the words on a page - start with how it affects your brain.
That s the message from Angus Fletcher, an English professor with degrees in both literature and neuroscience, who outlines in a new book a different way to read and think about stories, from classic literature to pulp fiction to movies and TV shows.
Literature wasn t invented just as entertainment or a way to deliver messages to readers, said Fletcher, who is a professor at The Ohio State University. Stories are actually a form of technology. They are tools that were designed by our ancestors to alleviate depression, reduce anxiety, kindle creativity, spark courage and meet a variety of other psychological challenges of being human, Fletcher said.
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The decision to donate to a charity is often driven by emotion rather than by calculated assessments based on how to make the biggest impact. In a review article published on April 29 in the journal
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, researchers look at what they call the psychology of (in)effective altruism and how people can be encouraged to direct their charitable contributions in ways that allow them to get more bang for the buck and help them to have a larger influence. In the past, most behavioral science research that s looked at charitable giving has focused on quantity and how people might be motivated to give more money to charity, or to give at all, says first author Lucius Caviola (@LuciusCaviola), a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. Our paper focuses on the effectiveness of giving how people decide which charity to give to and ways that people can be motivated to give to charities that are more effective.