Publications by authors named "Nils Wernerfelt"

Public health organizations increasingly use social media advertising campaigns in pursuit of public health goals. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of about $40 million of social media advertisements that were run and experimentally tested on Facebook and Instagram, aimed at increasing COVID-19 vaccination rates in the first year of the vaccine roll-out. The 819 randomized experiments in our sample were run by 174 different public health organizations and collectively reached 2.

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Low levels of social interaction across class lines have generated widespread concern and are associated with worse outcomes, such as lower rates of upward income mobility. Here we analyse the determinants of cross-class interaction using data from Facebook, building on the analysis in our companion paper. We show that about half of the social disconnection across socioeconomic lines-measured as the difference in the share of high-socioeconomic status (SES) friends between people with low and high SES-is explained by differences in exposure to people with high SES in groups such as schools and religious organizations.

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Social capital-the strength of an individual's social network and community-has been identified as a potential determinant of outcomes ranging from education to health. However, efforts to understand what types of social capital matter for these outcomes have been hindered by a lack of social network data. Here, in the first of a pair of papers, we use data on 21 billion friendships from Facebook to study social capital.

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People often favor members of their own group, while discriminating against members of other groups. Such in-group favoritism has been shown to play an important role in human cooperation. However, in the face of changing conflicts and shifting alliances, it is essential for group identities to be flexible.

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