Food choice mimicry on a large university campus.

Social influence is a strong determinant of food consumption, which in turn influences the environment and health. Purchasing mimicry, a phenomenon where a person copies another person's purchases, has been identified as the key governing mechanism. Although consistent observations have been made on the role of purchasing mimicry in driving similarities in food consumption, much less is known about the precise prevalence, the affected subpopulations, and the food types most strongly associated with mimicry effects.

People who share encounters with racism are silenced online by humans and machines, but a guideline-reframing intervention holds promise.

Are members of marginalized communities silenced on social media when they share personal experiences of racism? Here, we investigate the role of algorithms, humans, and platform guidelines in suppressing disclosures of racial discrimination. In a field study of actual posts from a neighborhood-based social media platform, we find that when users talk about their experiences as targets of racism, their posts are disproportionately flagged for removal as toxic by five widely used moderation algorithms from major online platforms, including the most recent large language models. We show that human users disproportionately flag these disclosures for removal as well.

Measuring and shaping the nutritional environment via food sales logs: case studies of campus-wide food choice and a call to action.

Although diets influence health and the environment, measuring and changing nutrition is challenging. Traditional measurement methods face challenges, and designing and conducting behavior-changing interventions is conceptually and logistically complicated. Situated local communities such as university campuses offer unique opportunities to shape the nutritional environment and promote health and sustainability.

Revealed versus potential spatial accessibility of healthcare and changing patterns during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Background: Timely access to healthcare is essential but measuring access is challenging. Prior research focused on analyzing potential travel times to healthcare under optimal mobility scenarios that do not incorporate direct observations of human mobility, potentially underestimating the barriers to receiving care for many populations.

Methods: We introduce an approach for measuring accessibility by utilizing travel times to healthcare facilities from aggregated and anonymized smartphone Location History data.

Linguistic effects on news headline success: Evidence from thousands of online field experiments (Registered Report).

What makes written text appealing? In this registered report, we study the linguistic characteristics of news headline success using a large-scale dataset of field experiments (A/B tests) conducted on the popular website Upworthy.com comparing multiple headline variants for the same news articles. This unique setup allows us to control for factors that could otherwise have important confounding effects on headline success.