Noteworthy News

Center Member and the co-director of Penn’s Development Research Initiative, Guy Grossman’s paper “Community policing does not build citizen trust in police or reduce crime in the Global South” was featured in an article published by Penn Today. In their recent interview, Looking at community policing in the Global South, Grossman and his coauthor, Dorothy Kronick, discuss motivations behind a new study that looks at whether community policing reduces crime and improves trust between the police and citizens in the Global South. This study of six locations in the Global South—Brazil, Colombia, Liberia, the Philippines, Uganda, and Pakistan—showed no significant positive effect associated with community policing across the range of countries. When asked about the most important aspect for people to understand about this study, Grossman shared, “For community policing to have the intended benefits, a lot needs to take place. Police need to devote a lot more resources, there needs to be more top-down supervision and there needs to be more engagement on the side of the community, especially in places that start from a low base of trust in the police.”

Philip E. Tetlock, Center Member and Annenberg University Professor with appointments in Wharton, psychology, and political science was recently interviewed on the New York Times’ The Ezra Klein Show. In this recent podcast interview, Tetlock discusses what sets “superforecasters” apart from others and how the rest of us can learn about the intellectual virtues, habits of mind and ways of thinking that help with better forecasting. The full transcript of the interview can be found here.

Philip E. Tetlock was also interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s podcast series “Think with Pinker” where he, Sally Satel, a psychiatrist and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and Pinker explore the trade-off between taboos and our ability to reason clearly.

Center member and Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Alison Buttenheim was recently featured in the article, About 30% of fully vaccinated Americans have gotten boosted; omicron could speed things up published in The Seattle Times (originally published in the Washington Post). Underlining the fatigue everyone is feeling, Buttenheim, a behavioral scientist who studies vaccine acceptance shares that when attention is a “limited resource”, it helps when messaging from officials and experts aligns with what people are experiencing around them. With only 30 percent of US population fully vaccinated and boosted, behavioral scientists featured in this piece believe that the uncertainty about who needs boosters and how they help may explain why uptake is not higher, and booster numbers can rise, especially as messaging strengthens around those doses amid concern about the omicron variant. 

Damon M. Centola, a center member and Elihu Katz Professor of Communication, Sociology, and Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania recently published this article for Los Angeles Times. In the opinion piece “Op-Ed: Medical bias can be deadly. Our research found a way to curb it,” Centola discusses racial and gender biases in the healthcare system and his recent work to potentially alleviate the problem. Centola and his colleagues published a study in the journal Nature Communications investigating the potential of a peer-network approach to reduce bias in medical treatment decisions within an experimental setting. “While no single discovery or innovation can eradicate race and gender bias from medicine, using egalitarian networks to improve medical care could spark a badly needed paradigm shift, where we train future clinicians to seek answers through peer problem-solving networks rather than deferring to seniority”, writes Centola. 

Rinad Beidas, a Center member and Director of Penn Implementation Science Center at the University of Pennsylvania, was featured in this Philly Voice article  "The psychological toll of the COVID-19 pandemic has hit mental health providers hard, too". This recent piece discusses a recent Penn Medicine study by Beidas and her colleagues who find that a number of factors — including clinicians’ educational debt and their struggles with finding care to deal with their own mental health issues — have made it hard to get more professionals in the field. Senior author of the study, Beidas emphasizes that “we are in a global health crisis, and there are not enough providers to meet the needs.” Findings from Beidas’s recent research raise concerns about the stress of providing care in under-resourced clinical settings and she and her team of researchers believe this “should be a wake-up call alerting people to the financial investment and measures necessary to support current mental health professionals and expand the workforce.”

 

On December 9, 2021, the Penn Center for Social Norms and Behavioral Dynamics officially launched its new Working Paper Series. This Working Paper Series will showcase pre-publication versions of interdisciplinary work that the vast network of our center members and affiliates are doing around the world. Center Founding Director Cristina Bicchieri gave opening remarks at the launch event, and emphasized the Center’s aim of enabling organizations around the world to sustainably enact positive behavioral change through specialized consulting, research, and training. The full video of the launch event is available on our Youtube Channel and on our website. Speakers including:

• “In Science we (should) trust: expectations and compliance during the COVID-19 pandemic” - presented by Enrique Fatas, Center Member, Behavioral scientist & Distinguished Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.

• “Nudging Enforcers: How Norm Perceptions and Motives for Lying Shape Sanctions” - presented by Eugen Dimant, Center member and Associate Professor of Practice at the University of Pennsylvania.

• “Perceived Inequality and Policy Preferences” - presented by Abraham Navarrete, Center Visiting Scholar. 

• “Collective Action on Corruption in Nigeria: the Social Norms and Accountable Governance Project” - presented by Raj Patel, Post-Doctoral Fellow, Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) at the University of Pennsylvania.

• “Improving Sanitation Practices Using Norm-Based Interventions: Evidence from Tamil Nadu”  - presented by Alex Shpenev, Senior Data Research Scientist at the Center.                     

• “The Power of Narratives in Social Norm Interventions: A Study of the Civic Culture Initiatives by Antanas Mockus in Bogota, Colombia” - presented by Paulius Yamin, Managing Director at the center

In our NoBeC talk series, we most recently featured Dave Rand [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] on January 13, 2022, with his talk "Understanding and Reducing Online Misinformation Across 16 Countries on Six Continents". The video of this talk is available on our YouTube Channel as well as our NoBeC Talk Series webpage here. 


As a quick update regarding upcoming NoBeC Talks, our next talk will feature Rachel Kranton [Duke University]. This talk, "Deconstructing Bias in Social Preferences", is scheduled for January 27, 2022.
 

For more information about the NoBeC talk series, please visit our website. Our Spring 2022 schedule is now available and features talks from notable industry and academic experts including Dave Rand, Rachel Kranton, Alexander Vostroknutov, Hugo Mercier, Daniele Nosenzo, Erin Krupka, Sara Lowes, and Michael Muthukrishna.

Event Brief

Our Center Founding Director Professor Cristina Bicchieri gave a talk at the e-seminar series on Experimental and Behavioural Economics organized by the Behavioral and Economic Science Cluster (BESC) of the School of Economics at the University of Queensland. At this event, Bicchieri discussed her work on expectations and compliance during the COVID-19 pandemic from a recent cross-country study, highlighting the finding that both empirical expectations (what others do) and normative expectations (what others approve of) play a significant role in compliance, beyond the effect of any other individual or group characteristic. 

Rafael Ventura, Affiliated Center Member and MindCORE-sponsored postdoctoral scholar in the SCEW group at the University of Pennsylvania presented at the Thick Concepts in the Philosophy of Science Workshop, a hybrid event hosted by The DFG Research Training Group 2073 “Integrating Ethics and Epistemology of Scientific Research.” Ventura presented his work entitled “Concept and Measure of Adaptation to Climate Change.”

Ryan Muldoon, Affiliated Center Member and Professor of Philosophy and Director of the PPE Program at the University of Buffalo presented at The Amsterdam Conference on Tolerance on January 20, 2022. This conference was centered around discussions on the meaning of tolerance, respect, acceptance and appreciation and audience members heard from a variety of international researchers, local politicians and inspirations. Muldoon presented during the General Session Panel titled “What is tolerance?” 

Barbara Mellers, a Center member and Professor of Psychology and Marketing at the University of Pennsylvania, was recently invited by the Department of Strategy & Innovation at Vienna University of Economics and Business to give a virtual seminar on “Crowd Wisdom.” Her talk focused on Crowd Wisdom, a concept referring to the accuracy that is attained when judgments from independent individuals are averaged. Mellers’ work in the domain of group judgement and team work over the years examines this concept, including in her most recent work that measures group-level collective calibration scores before discussion. In this recent study, Mellers and her team of researchers argue that when confidence and knowledge are positively associated across group members, the group’s most knowledgeable members are more likely to influence the group’s answers and knowing what we know (and what we don’t know) can help predict whether interactions will strengthen or weaken crowd wisdom.

Eugen Dimant was invited to speak at the Allied Social Sciences Association (ASSA)’s Virtual Annual Meeting. He presented his joint work “Strategic Behavior with Tight, Loose, and Polarized Norms” with Professor Yan Chen, Dr. Michael Thaler, and Professor Andrea Robbett. Their work addressed the less studied aspect of norms, namely the role that their strength, tightness, and degree of polarization play. They studied both theoretical and empirical approaches and found that in addition to the mean, the variance, and shape of the observed behavior matter. 

Michael Hallsworth, a Center Board Member, Managing Director of BIT Americas, and author of the book “Behavioral Insights,” spoke at the December SPOKES Private Technology Conference. At this conference, Hallsworth participated in the panel, “What Behavioral Economics Can Teach Privacy Officers” and shared his insights about using behavioral economics to influence culture and change behavior.

Center advisory board member and Chair in Social Psychology in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics Saadi Lahlou spoke at the World Pandemic Research Network (WPRN) and gave the welcome addresses. Another center member Enrique Fatas also gave a keynote speech about his joint work with Cristina Bicchieri, “In science we (should) trust: Expectations and compliance across nine countries during the COVID-19 pandemic”.  #WPRN21 is the first international forum for researchers and practitioners from all areas of expertise and backgrounds working on the human, economic, and societal impacts of COVID-19, giving them the opportunity to present ongoing projects, disseminate insights and results, and to make connections for future collaboration. 

Publication Pulse

Guy Grossman, is also the first author on a new paper soon to be featured in the 25th volume of the Annual Review of Political Science. The paper is called “Government Responsiveness in Developing Countries” and reviews the current literature on government responsiveness, with a focus on public goods and service delivery in developing countries. The authors identify three types of actors that are commonly present in these accounts: politicians, bureaucrats, and citizens. To better develop our understanding of responsiveness and accountability in low- and middle-income countries and beyond, they encourage future literature to consider interactions between all three types of actors. 

Center member and evolutionary and cognitive psychologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research, Hugo Mercier has co-authored a new paper in the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review. The paper, “Research note: Fighting misinformation or fighting for information?,” questions how much of a priority fighting against fake news should be, arguing that interventions aimed at reducing acceptance or spread of such news are bound to have very small effects on the overall quality of the information environment. This paper was also highlighted by the Nieman Lab and witten about here.

Enrique Fatas, Center Member, Behavioral scientist & Distinguished Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, and Lina Restrepo-Plaza, an Affiliated Center Member, Associate Professor of Economics at Universidad del Valle, and Director of the Research Group E-Socials: Experimental Social Sciences and Behavioural Change have co-authored a new paper together. In their paper, When losses can be a gain. A large lab-in-the-field experiment on reference dependent forgiveness in Colombia, Fatas and Restrepo-Plaza look into the process through which violent crime offenders can be accepted into restorative justice programs if the victim agrees. They test the use of framing, defaults and beliefs on promoting victims’ forgiveness. 

Upasak Das, an Affiliated Center Member and a Presidential Fellow on Economics of Poverty Reduction in the Global Development Institute, at the University of Manchester, co-authored a new paper published in the Energy Economics Journal. Entitled “Adding fuel to human capital: Exploring the educational effects of cooking fuel choice from rural India,” this study examines the effect of household cooking fuel choice on educational outcomes of adolescent children in rural India. Das and the author find that solid fuel usage (such as firewood) adversely impacts school attendance, years of schooling and age-appropriate grade progression among children and especially girls. 

Center member and Ph.D. student in Psychology at the University of Cambridge Sakshi Ghai published her article Lack of sample diversity in research on adolescent depression and social media use: a scoping review and meta-analysis in the journal, PsyArXiv. She and her collaborators tackle the problem of adequately representing the diversity of global adolescents on social media. They conducted a pre-registered scoping review and found that sample diversity is lacking between regions. Specifically, the link between social media and depression is positive and significant in the Global North but null and non-significant in the Global South. They further found little evidence of diversity within regions in both sampling choices and reporting of participants’ demographics. 

Abraham Navarrete, a Visiting Scholar at the Center, recently published his work A theory of social programs, legitimacy, and citizen cooperation with the state in the Journal of Peace Research. He proposes a series of game-theoretic models that focus on the strategic interaction between a state and a citizen in the face of a challenge to the state’s monopoly of power by an insurgency. The analysis shows that citizen cooperation depends on whether the increase in the provision of aid is accompanied by an increase in the use of violent or hard tools by the state, the citizens’ expectation of future rewards, and the insurgency’s response. The models thus provide a rationale for why social programs, even if they increase state legitimacy, fail to increase citizen cooperation.