Lessons learned from COVID: The role of social media
Researchers found that social media played a critical role in decreasing COVID positivity rates at educational institutions
Peer-Reviewed PublicationIMAGE: SEBASTIAN SOUYRIS, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR AND DEAN R. WELLINGTON ’83 (JUNIOR) CHAIR AT RENSSELAER POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE’S LALLY SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT, AND ANTON IVANOV, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR IN THE GIES COLLEGE OF BUSINESS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS URBANA-CHAMPAIGN. view more
CREDIT: RENSSELAER POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE
Now that we’ve arguably rounded the corner from the pandemic, researchers are dissecting our response and how we can improve it in the future.
Sebastian Souyris, assistant professor and Dean R. Wellington ’83 (Junior) Chair at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Lally School of Management, contributed to research led by Anton Ivanov, assistant professor in the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. This recently published research examined social media’s impact on health outcomes and dove into the power of visual nudges.
The research team discovered that employing social media posts as a means of visual nudging to encourage safe behaviors significantly impacts COVID-19 positivity rates. Images that communicated the value of wearing masks made a real difference. This effect remains evident even after accounting for various organizational characteristics and disease dynamics at multiple levels.
“Our findings are significant to public health institutions and experts,” Souyris said. “Visual nudges are non-invasive, cost-effective methods to shape attitudes and behavior.”
The team found that visual nudges by institutional actors, such as a university, result in decreased COVID-19 positivity rates of up to 25%. Further, the value of these visual nudges is highest three to five weeks in advance.
“Our empirical results show that four to five weeks of accumulation usually create the momentum required for people to bring that topic to the top of their agenda,” Ivanov said.
High levels of uncertainty added to the public health challenge of COVID-19. After public places shut down, there was a lack of consensus on what they should do to reopen safely. Previous research found that in such a climate, mandates are not enough to ensure maximum compliance and that social media is a critical outreach tool.
The team, which included Dr. Souyris, built upon existing research and the relatively new concept of nudge theory. Nudge theory focuses on using indirect suggestions and positive reinforcement to influence behavior, especially when applied visually. Prior to this study, visual nudges specific to social media had not been explored extensively.
The team analyzed data from 117 universities nationwide. They examined COVID-19 testing data; Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter images from official university accounts; university policies; and university and local characteristics. They found that so-called “soft” visual nudges were most effective, in that they did not have a direct message to wear a mask but simply depicted people wearing masks.
“Although we certainly hope that a crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic will not happen again, it behooves us to learn from our experience to enable a more effective response in the future,” said Chanaka Edirisinghe, acting dean of Rensselaer’s Lally School of Management. “Dr. Souyris’ research profiles the benefits of using the simple, inexpensive tool of social media to deliver vital public health information.”
About Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute:
Founded in 1824, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is America’s first technological research university. Rensselaer encompasses five schools, over 30 research centers, more than 140 academic programs including 25 new programs, and a dynamic community made up of over 6,800 students and 104,000 living alumni. Rensselaer faculty and alumni include upwards of 155 National Academy members, six members of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, six National Medal of Technology winners, five National Medal of Science winners, and a Nobel Prize winner in Physics. With nearly 200 years of experience advancing scientific and technological knowledge, Rensselaer remains focused on addressing global challenges with a spirit of ingenuity and collaboration. To learn more, please visit www.rpi.edu.
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JOURNAL
Production and Operations Management
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Computational simulation/modeling
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
Not applicable
ARTICLE TITLE
Informational value of visual nudges during crises: Improving public health outcomes through social media engagement amid covid-19
Timely pandemic countermeasures
reduce both health damage and
economic loss
IMAGE: COSTS OF PATH A ARE COMPARED WITH THOSE OF PATH B. BOTH THE ECONOMIC AND MEDICAL COSTS OF PATH A ARE HIGHER THAN THOSE OF PATH B, REGARDLESS OF THE DETAILS OF THE PATHS view more
CREDIT: TSUYOSHI HONDOU
The COVID-19 pandemic has had, and continues to have, profound impacts on the world. In the early stages of the pandemic, many countries adopted stringent countermeasures to limit the spread of the disease. These included extended lockdowns, particularly when medical care systems were pushed to the brink.
But these measures also had a significant socioeconomic impact, with many losing their jobs and/or reporting an uptick in depression and other negative impacts on their mental health. As such, economists have begun to examine numerically the cost-benefit of such measures. Yet, numbers can only get us so far. Tsuyoshi Hondou, an associate professor at Tohoku University's Graduate School of Science, has turned to an alternative source for answers: physics.
Hondou's physics-based analysis determined that embracing early, less severe preventative measures helped slow the spread of disease and lessened economic damage. "We formulated a theoretical framework using methodologies from physics, to gain results unattainable by conventional methods of economics," said Hondou. "We analytically demonstrated that adopting timely and moderate measurers reconciled the medical effectiveness and economic impact."
Physics often employs simple models, where a few elements essential to a system are examined. Despite the simplicity, this form of analysis still provides deep insights and high predictability.
Likewise, Hondou's framework assumed minimal and common factors pertaining to pandemic regulation and economics. From there, it derived analytical inequalities - mathematical expressions that establish a relationship between two or more variables where one is greater than or less than another - for the medical and economic costs of different countermeasures.
These inequalities showed that small but steady countermeasures slowed the infection rate and limited the economic fallout better than strict countermeasures implemented just before a crisis.
"Our general but robust findings indicate that delaying countermeasures leads to cost increases, and once the infected population climbs more than the population under timely and moderate measurers, the system becomes economically irreversible as additional expenditures begin to snowball," adds Hondou.
Hondou, however, cautions that the findings are based only on the most essential properties of a pandemic. "Still, our results can serve as a useful basis for considering more realistic situations."
Details of his findings were published in the Journal of the Physical Society of Japan on March 29, 2023.
Example of delay effects in countermeasures in path A of Fig. 1. No measure is assumed in the 1st segment between t=0 and t=T1. As path B is a reference and independent of the delay, the ratio of the cost of path A to that of path B shows how the delay affects costs. The greater the period T1, the larger the delay in countermeasures. Medical cost is assumed to be proportional to the infected population, for simplicity. (a) Medical cost, (b) Intervention cost.
CREDIT
Tsuyoshi Hondou
JOURNAL
Journal of the Physical Society of Japan
ARTICLE TITLE
Timely Pandemic Countermeasures Reduce both Health Damage and Economic Loss: Generality of the Exact Solution
Worldwide, those with ‘traditional’ values adhered more strictly to COVID precautions
UCLA-led study could help officials tailor health and safety policies to appeal to populations with a variety of social views
Peer-Reviewed PublicationGiven the battles over COVID-19 rules and recommendations in the United States over the past three years, the findings of a new UCLA-led study may come as a bit of a shock: Globally, those who professed to hold traditional values tended to adhere more closely to coronavirus-prevention measures than those who considered themselves more liberal.
“Across a wide range of countries, people who endorsed traditional cultural values — a position that often underlies socially conservative political philosophies — were more likely to report taking strict COVID-19 precautions, despite the opposite pattern being observed in the U.S.,” said study author Theodore Samore, a UCLA doctoral student in anthropology.
The findings, published today in the peer-reviewed, open-access journal Scientific Reports, have important implications for understanding how people around the world may respond to future disease outbreaks and measures designed to protect them from pandemics and other global threats. The results, the authors say, can help public health officials better craft policies that account for differences in values across populations.
Previous research on the intersection of politics and psychology has shown that social conservatives are more strongly attuned to threats and dangers than social liberals, who tend to view the world as a generally safe place. Conservatives and traditionalists, therefore, display a stronger inclination to embrace protective behaviors. Although the specific issues on which conservatives and liberals differ can vary from country to country, all societies have some values that considered traditional.
The COVID-19 pandemic allowed social scientists to examine this relationship between traditionalism and threat response on a global scale. To counter the threat of the virus in its early days, before vaccines were widely available, public health officials around the world recommended similar precautionary measures, including hand-washing, mask-wearing and physical distancing.
An international team of 44 scholars led by Samore and anthropology professor Daniel Fessler surveyed nearly 8,000 people in 27 countries across North America, South America, Europe, Asia and Africa. The researchers asked participants to respond to a series of questions and statements — for example, “Traditions are the foundation of a healthy society and should be respected” — to determine if they considered themselves to be “traditional.” They followed up with queries about which precautionary measures people took in their efforts to avoid becoming infected with COVID-19.
In 21 of the 27 countries, the investigators found a strong link between traditional values and strict adherence to precautionary behaviors. In some societies, the effect was small but significant; in others, it was more substantial.
Digging deeper, they found that individuals balanced the relative benefits of taking precautions to mitigate the risk of a hazardous disease against the social costs and missed opportunities entailed by being cautious — and that a person’s values influenced how much weight they place on the latter.
The results did not seem to differ any way based on where the country was located or how economically developed it was.
Why the difference with American conservatives?
In the U.S. — which has been shown to be something of a global outlier in this regard — the investigators found that factors like a distrust of science, concerns about the effects disease precautions may have on the economy and the desire to preserve personal liberties suppressed the predicted cautionary decision-making of social conservatives, even though that group is more likely to self-describe as “traditional.”
“In countries where the discourse around science and trust was less polarized, traditionalists were more willing to embrace precautions than their more socially liberal counterparts,” Fessler said. “The U.S., where these topics were highly politicized, suffered more COVID-19 deaths per capita than any other highly developed nation.”
American social conservatives, for example, were more likely to attend a group religious observance at a church or temple even though public health officials had recommended avoiding large gatherings. However, after the investigators took into account that these social conservatives trusted science less and were more concerned about the economy than their socially liberal counterparts, the expected relationship between traditionalism and heightened precautions appeared in the U.S. too.
The researchers said that designing health policies that resonate with less traditional people, as well as with social conservatives in the U.S. and other countries who bucked against COVID-19 precautions, will be crucial to saving lives in the future.
“Marshalling broad support for policies intended to protect the public,” Samore said, “will hinge on rebuilding widespread trust in science and crafting policies in ways that take differences in concerns and priorities seriously — and on encouraging influential information sources to provide accurate accounts of the pros and cons of those policies.”
JOURNAL
Scientific Reports
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