Our work in recent years has focused on how to prevent people from falling for misinformation in the first place, building on a framework from social psychology known as inoculation theory.
With this pandemic, argues Robert Dingwall, fear amplification has been policy, based on the advice of a particular group of behavioral scientists advising the United Kingdom’s government.
The reports from Britain’s hospitals in the last few days have been truly worrying. No one should doubt the reality of what […]
David Canter considers the tragic implications of people not understanding what they are told by politicians and experts.
It is possible that we could abolish death by COVID, argues Robert Dingwall, by continuing the restrictions of 2020 indefinitely – the problem, of course, is that we would simply die from something else.
The saga of the UK’s contact tracing app(s) should be an object lesson in how not to approach the use of technology in public policy – and why politicians in particular need to step back and rethink their approach to technology, and in particular to privacy.
Understanding how to create the conditions for a thriving civil society — that works in partnership with local governments and communities to […]
David Canter considers why the social sciences failed to influence behavior in order to stop the spread of COVID-19. The virologists had been preparing for a new virus for some years, so were already ahead of the game when they had to start creating a new vaccine. What preparations had social psychologists, sociologists or anthropologists for the inevitable emergence of a new pandemic?
“We are, as a species, addicted to story,” says English professor Jonathan Gottschall in his book, The Storytelling Animal. “Even when the […] Tom Burns, whose combination of play — and plays – with teaching in higher education added a light, collaborative and engaging model […] The creation of the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) has led to a heated debate on the balance between peer review and evaluative metrics in research assessment regimes. Luciana Balboa, Elizabeth Gadd, Eva Mendez, Janne Pölönen, Karen Stroobants, Erzsebet Toth Cithra and the CoARA Steering Board address these arguments and state CoARA’s commitment to finding ways in which peer review and bibliometrics can be used together responsibly. David Canter reveals how he discovered Microsoft Copilot acted like a lazy student, inventing responses with apparent confidence that were blatantly wrong. […] “We are, as a species, addicted to story,” says English professor Jonathan Gottschall in his book, The Storytelling Animal. “Even when the […] The interactional skill of large language models enables them to carry out qualitative research interviews at speed and scale. Demonstrating the ability of these new techniques in a range of qualitative enquiries, Friedrich Geiecke and Xavier Jaravel, present a new open source platform to support this new form of qualitative research.
EXPLORE
Impact
Canada’s Storytellers Challenge Seeks Compelling Narratives About Student Research
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Tom Burns, 1959-2024: A Pioneer in Learning Development
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Research Assessment, Scientometrics, and Qualitative v. Quantitative Measures
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Innovation
Beware! AI Can Lie.
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Canada’s Storytellers Challenge Seeks Compelling Narratives About Student Research
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Our Open-Source Tool Allows AI-Assisted Qualitative Research at Scale
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