Project Overview
- TalkingDrinks: Decision-making about alcohol within complex information environments
- Sharing:
- Understanding and manipulating information sharing
- Audience Tuning
- Polarization:
- Social information sharing as an indicator of polarization
- Epistemic Vigilance: Attitude formation, epistemic vigilance, and propagation of polarized information in Northern Irish teens
- Agree/Disagree: Information processing across attitudinal stances
- Harmful Communication?: Health Communication, Mental Well-Being and Social Media
TalkingDrinks
Goals and Research Questions
Multiple competing factors like anti-alcohol campaigns and party-loving friends influence daily health behavior. It is hard to describe how we integrate various factors in a decision. For our brains, this task is easy. This project examines young adults’ brain activity to understand how competing information about alcohol influence health-related decisions.
Key Research Questions:
- How do young adults integrate peer-produced and professional, pro- and anti-alcohol information in decision-making about alcohol consumption?
- What are the effects of peer-produced and professional anti-alcohol information on the occurrence and valence of interpersonal communication about alcohol?
Publications & Other Content
OSF page: https://osf.io/cg3fn/
[Data collection in progress]
Collaborators
Dr. Hang-Yee Chan, Dr. Hanneke Hendriks
Funding
NWO (Dutch Science Foundation) Veni grant (#VI.veni.191G.034)
Sharing
Goals and Research Questions
Social sharing of information (e.g. on social media) plays a big part in determining what information is widely available and impactful in a population. Diverse stakeholders from public health officials, to marketing professionals, to everyday social media users place high value on the number of shares their content receives and have a strong interest in increasing that number. Across several projects, we are aiming to understand why people decide to share content online and use this knowledge to design new interventions that causally impact online information sharing.
Key Research Questions:
- What are the neuropsychologial mechanisms underlying online sharing decisions?
- Can interventions that target the neuropsychological mechanisms of sharing causally influence sharing decisions?
- What are the mechanisms of audience tuning (adjusting shared content to specific, for instance small and large, audiences)?
Publications and Other Content
Cosme, D., Scholz, C., Chan, H. Y., Doré, B. P., Pandey, P., Carreras-Tartak, J., … & Falk, E. B. (2022). Message self and social relevance increases intentions to share content: Correlational and causal evidence from six studies. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. PDF
Baek, E.C., O’Donnel, M.B., Scholz, C., Pei, R., Garcia, J.O., Vettel, J.M., Falk, E.B. (2021). Activity in the brain’s valuation and metnalizing networks is associated with propagation of online recommendations. Scientific Reports 11(1), 1-11. PDF
Chan, H.-Y., Scholz, C., Baek, E., O’Donnell, M. B., & Falk, E. (2021). Being the gatekeeper: How thinking about sharing affects neural encoding of information. Cerebral Cortex. PDF
Doré, B., Scholz, C., Baek, E.C., Falk, E.B. (2020). Health news sharing is reflected in distributed reward-related brain activity. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 15(10), 1111-1119. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsaa129, PDF, Supplementary materials
Scholz, C., Baek, E.C., Jovanova, M., Falk, E.B. (2020). Media Content Sharing as a Value-Based Decision. Current Opinion in Psychology, 31, 83-88. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2019.08.004, PDF
Scholz, C., Baek, E. C., O’Donnell, M. B., & Falk, E. B. (2020). Decision-making about broad- and narrowcasting: A Neuroscientific Perspective, Media Psychology, 23(1), 131-155. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/15213269.2019.1572522,
Data and code available online: https://github.com/cnlab/narrowbroad, PDF
Baek, E.C., Scholz, C. Falk, E.B. (2020). The neuroscience of information propagation: Key role of the mentalizing system. In: Floyd, K. & Weber, R. (Eds.) Handbook of Communication Science and Biology. New York, NY: Routledge. PDF
Scholz, C., Falk, E. B. (2020). The neuroscience of information sharing. In S. Gonzalez-Bailon, B. Foucault Welles. (Eds.) Handbook of Communication in the Networked Age. Oxford University Press. PDF
Doré, B., Scholz, C., Baek, E. C., O’Donnell, M. B., & Falk, E. B. (2019). Brain Activity Tracks Population Information Sharing by Capturing Consensus Judgments of Value. Cerebral Cortex. 29(7), 3102-2110, https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhy176, PDF
Falk, E. B., Scholz, C. (2018). Persuasion, Influence, and Value: Perspectives from Communication and Social Neuroscience. Annual Review of Psychology. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-122216-011821, PDF
Scholz, C.*, Baek, E. C.*, O’Donnell, M. B., Kim, H. S., Cappella, J. N., & Falk, E. B. (2017). A neural model of valuation and information virality. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, DOI: 1073/pnas.1615259114, PDF, Supplementary Materials
Data and code available online: https://github.com/cnlab/viralityPNAS
Baek, E. C.*, Scholz, C.*, O’Donnell, M. B., & Falk, E. B. (2017). The value of sharing information: A neural account of information transmission. Psychological Science, PDF, Supplementary Materials
Data and code available online: https://github.com/cnlab/valuesharing
Collaborators
Many individuals have contributed to this research line, including all co-authors and those acknowledged for their help in all publications named above. Key collaborators include: Dr. Emily Falk, Dr. Elisa Baek, Dr. Dani Cosme, Dr. Hang-Yee Chan, and Dr. Bruce Doré.
Funding
Early stages of this work were funded by a PhD fellowhip of the Annenberg School for Communication Research at the University of Amsterdam and DARPA. Follow-up work was also funded by DARPA under Phase II STTR 12.A, Topic No. A12A-T009 (SMART II) Charles Rivers Analytics / Falk (Penn PI) Award Number 140D0419C0093
Polarization
Goals and Research Questions
Polarization, that is the entrenchment of strong, opposing attitudes within a group or population, hinders the development of flourishing, productive, and peaceful societies. Across several projects, we examine
- basic psychological mechanisms of attitude formation and the processing of pro- and counter-attitudinal information in different contexts (e.g. in isolation vs. group-contexts),
- developmental patterns of epistemic vigilance and polarization in children and teens
- biases in communication (e.g. information sharing) that may be indicative of polarization
Publications and Other Contents
[Data collection in progress]
Collaborators
This research line is in it’s early stages, but has been made possible by the members of the steering group of the Research Priority Area “Polarization” at the Faculty of Behavioral and Social Sciences, University of Amsterdam, especially Gijs Schumacher and Marte Otten. Another key collaborators include Dr. Hang-Yee Chan and Dr. Steven Scholte.
Work in Northern Ireland which is currently funded by the Templeton World Foundation is in collaboration with Dr. Jocelyn Dautel, Dr. Emma Flynn, Dr. Jing Xu, Dr. Lara Wood, Dr. Bethany Corbett, Dr. Kathleen Corriveau, Dr. Jennifer Neal, and Dr. Maria Kornbluh.
Funding
One line of work within this research program that is focused on basic psychological mechanisms of polarization as well as sharing biases as potential indicators of polarization is a funded PhD project of the Research Priority Area on Polarization at the Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences of the University of Amsterdam. Another line of work on the development of epistemic vigilance and biased information propagation is funded by the Templeton World Foundation.
Harmful Communication?
In this project, we examine the role of mental well-being in health communication. Recent public health crises like the Covid-19 pandemic have highlighted the importance of effective health communication to guide attitude formation and adaptive (e.g. health-protective) behavior in large populations. We observe that many of the strategies that have been developed to enhance the persuasiveness of health communication materials work by eliciting negative affective states (e.g. fear or perceived personal risk) that are meant to motivate message receivers to act. In this project, we investigate the interrelationships between mental well-being and the persuasiveness of commonly used health communication strategies. We further examine whether social media interactions can buffer message receivers against negative effects of health communication on mental well-being.
Key Research Questions:
- What is the effect of commonly used health communication strategies on indicators of mental well-being?
- What are differences in how people with high vs. low mental well-being process and respond to health communication messages?
- What is the role of social media interactions on the effects of commonly used health communication strategies on mental well-being?
Publications and Other Contents
[Data collection in progress]
Collaborators
Spela Dolinsek is the PhD student working on this project. Next to Dr. Scholz, co-supervisers of this project include Prof. Julia van Weert, Prof. Bas van den Putte, and Dr. Corine Meppelink.
Funding
This PhD project is funded by the Amsterdam School of Communication Research.