Trust in scientists and their role in society across 68 countries.

Science is crucial for evidence-based decision-making. Public trust in scientists can help decision makers act on the basis of the best available evidence, especially during crises. However, in recent years the epistemic authority of science has been challenged, causing concerns about low public trust in scientists.

Perceptions of science, science communication, and climate change attitudes in 68 countries - the TISP dataset.

Science is integral to society because it can inform individual, government, corporate, and civil society decision-making on issues such as public health, new technologies or climate change. Yet, public distrust and populist sentiment challenge the relationship between science and society. To help researchers analyse the science-society nexus across different geographical and cultural contexts, we undertook a cross-sectional population survey resulting in a dataset of 71,922 participants in 68 countries.

Reactance as a Persuasive Strategy: How Health Communication Can Harness Anger to Leverage Behavior Change.

According to psychological reactance theory, individuals who perceive a threat to or loss of valued behavior will experience reactance - an amalgam of anger and negative cognitions that motivates an effort to regain behavioral freedom. The limited effects of health communication interventions have often been attributed to psychological reactance, and previous research has tended to focus on how to design health messages that mitigate this phenomenon. However, the motivational nature of reactance suggests that it might also be used to promote health.

Conspiracy narratives and vaccine hesitancy: a scoping review of prevalence, impact, and interventions.

Believing conspiracy narratives is frequently assumed to be a major cause of vaccine hesitancy, i.e., the tendency to forgo vaccination despite its availability.

Explaining seasonality increases perceived effectiveness of influenza vaccination: An experimental study.

Background: Doubts regarding vaccine effectiveness may prompt people to decide against a seasonal influenza vaccination. While fact boxes show the effectiveness in terms of cases prevented, people often lack knowledge about important contextual factors, for example, why the vaccine formulation needs to be updated annually, the vaccine mechanism and relevance of the antigen-virus match. Adding such contextual information could improve effectiveness perceptions.

Study protocol of the planetary health action survey PACE: a serial cross-sectional survey to assess the readiness to act against climate change.

Introduction: Climate change is a paramount global health threat with multifaceted implications. Societal change is required to mitigate the negative effects of climate change, as well as help people adapt to the associated health risks. This requires situation-specific, large-scale data to help scientists and policymakers understand public perceptions and behaviours and identify the levers to increase public readiness to act against climate change and protect health.

Background uncertainty does not increase risk aversion in decision making.

Some theories in economics and psychology propose that background uncertainty, which is uncertainty that is independent of a person's actual decision, can alter people's risk-taking behavior with respect to that decision. However, previous empirical research mostly relying on single experiments is inconclusive regarding the existence of this effect. Here, we systematically investigate the effect of background uncertainty on decision-making.

Association of the belief in conspiracy narratives with vaccination status and recommendation behaviours of German physicians.

Vaccine hesitancy has been identified as one of the top ten threats to global health by the World Health Organization (WHO). The belief in conspiracy narratives is repeatedly discussed as a major driver of vaccine hesitancy among the general population. However, there is a lack of research investigating the role of the belief in conspiracy narratives in vaccination decisions and recommendation behaviours of physicians.

Same same but different: The graded influence of vowel quality and prosodic prominence on letter detection.

This study investigates the impact of phonetic realisation and prosodic prominence on visual letter identification, focusing on the letter  in German bisyllabic words. Building upon previous research, a computerised letter search task was conducted with 78 skilled adult readers. Words featuring different phonetic realisations of  (/eː, ɛ, e, l̩, n̩, ɐ/) in stressed and unstressed first and second syllables were systematically included.

Public preferences regarding slow codes in critical care.

The term slow code refers to an intentional reduction in the pace or intensity of resuscitative efforts during a medical emergency. This can be understood as an intermediate level between full code (full resuscitation efforts) and no code (no resuscitation efforts) and serves as a symbolic gesture when intervention is considered medically futile. While some previous research acknowledges the slow code as an integral part of clinical practice, many ethicists have condemned the practice as dishonest and causing unnecessary pain for the patient.

Rituals as Nature-Based Governance of reciprocity between people and nature.

The conventional approach to environmental governance, based on institutions, regulations, and interventions, has failed to stop the current ecological catastrophe. I suggest a radical alternative: Ritual as the core mode of 'nature-based governance' (NBG) that enacts deep and comprehensive reciprocity between people and nature. NBG grounds governance mechanisms in embodied more-than-human practices with normative force.

Hostility has a trivial effect on persuasiveness of rebutting science denialism on social media.

Polarised social media debates between science deniers and advocates for science frequently devolve into hostilities. We conducted four preregistered experiments (N = 3226; U.S.

Lessons from COVID-19 for behavioural and communication interventions to enhance vaccine uptake.

The Covid pandemic has yielded new insights into psychological vaccine acceptance factors. This knowledge serves as a basis for behavioral and communication interventions that can increase vaccination readiness for other diseases.

In Spiderman we trust: The influence of familiar media characters on the decision-making of primary school children.

Children are increasingly active consumers in the media world and are thus confronted with a wide range of information. Making good decisions in such an environment is a major challenge. Weighting valid information in decision-making is an important skill that children must learn and apply.

Using smartphones to study vaccination decisions in the wild.

One of the most important tools available to limit the spread and impact of infectious diseases is vaccination. It is therefore important to understand what factors determine people's vaccination decisions. To this end, previous behavioural research made use of, (i) controlled but often abstract or hypothetical studies (e.

Reduce, reuse, recycle: Introducing MetaPipeX, a framework for analyses of multi-lab data.

Multi-lab projects are large scale collaborations between participating data collection sites that gather empirical evidence and (usually) analyze that evidence using meta-analyses. They are a valuable form of scientific collaboration, produce outstanding data sets and are a great resource for third-party researchers. Their data may be reanalyzed and used in research synthesis.

Vaccination decision-making among mothers of children 0-12 months old in Nigeria: A qualitative study.

The contribution of vaccination to global health, especially in low-middle-income countries is one of the achievements in global governance of modern medicine, averting 2-3 million child deaths annually. However, in Nigeria, vaccine-preventable-diseases still account for one-in-eight child deaths before their fifth-year birthday. Nigeria is one of the ten countries where 4.

Toolbox of individual-level interventions against online misinformation.

The spread of misinformation through media and social networks threatens many aspects of society, including public health and the state of democracies. One approach to mitigating the effect of misinformation focuses on individual-level interventions, equipping policymakers and the public with essential tools to curb the spread and influence of falsehoods. Here we introduce a toolbox of individual-level interventions for reducing harm from online misinformation.

"Show Me What You Got": The Nomological Network of the Ability to Pose Facial Emotion Expressions.

Just as receptive emotional abilities, productive emotional abilities are essential for social communication. Although individual differences in receptive emotional abilities, such as perceiving and recognizing emotions, are well-investigated, individual differences in productive emotional abilities, such as the ability to express emotions in the face, are largely neglected. Consequently, little is known about how emotion expression abilities fit in a nomological network of related abilities and typical behavior.

Communicating diagnostic uncertainty reduces expectations of receiving antibiotics: Two online experiments with hypothetical patients.

The overprescription of antibiotics due to diagnostic uncertainty and inappropriate patient expectations influence antimicrobial resistance. This research assesses (i) whether communicating diagnostic uncertainty reduces expectations of receiving antibiotics and (ii) which communication strategies minimise unintended consequences of such communication. In two experimental online studies conducted in January and April 2023, participants read a vignette describing a doctor consultation for an ear infection and expressed their expectations of receiving antibiotics, trust in their doctor, rated the doctor's reputation and provided their intention to get a second doctor's opinion.

Infographics on risks associated with COVID-19 and the willingness to get the AstraZeneca vaccine: two randomized online experiments.

Background: Germans hesitated to get vaccinated with AstraZeneca in the COVID-19 pandemic after reports of blood clots.

Methods: In two preregistered online experiments with stratified randomization (Study 1 N = 824, Study 2: N = 1,056), we tested whether providing evidence-based benefit-risk information reduces the perceived risk of the AstraZeneca vaccine and the perceived probability of blood clots due to the AstraZeneca vaccine and increases the vaccination intention. In Study 1, participants saw no infographic (control) or one of two infographics (low vs.