Attitude change: persuasion and social influence

Identification of the health education targeted susceptible population of tuberculosis in Ningxia, Northwest China

Knowledge, Attitude, and Practice (KAP) survey, as an effective measure tool, is of practical significance for identifying the susceptible population in high-incidence regions of tuberculosis (TB). We aim to identify the health education targeted susceptible population of TB and discuss the acting pathway of KAP in Ningxia. A multistage random sampling method was used to conduct a face-to-face questionnaire survey for residents. The latent class analysis (LCA) model was used to classify susceptible populations of TB, and the structural equation modeling (SEM) model was also employed to investigate the interaction mechanisms of KAP (mediation analysis). We further applied the ordered logistic regression model to explore the associated factors. A total of 973 residents were enrolled, 70.6% were male, aged from 16 to 89. The LCA analysis demonstrated that 3 categories of susceptible populations of TB ("overall good", "positive attitude" and "overall poor") have optimal goodness of fit (BIC = 7889.5, Entropy = 0.923). SEM model indicated that the attitude plays a significant mediation effect from knowledge to practice toward TB (an indirect effect of 0.038, and a direct effect of 0.138). The ordered logistic regression results found that age, sex, marital status, education level, occupation, family income, self-perceived health status, having a family member or friend with TB, and knowing the DOTS strategy were significantly associated with classifications of KAP level towards TB. Based on the LCA model, we accurately classified the susceptible population of TB into 3 groups with different degrees of KAP. We found that TB attitude plays a mediating role between knowledge and practice. Therefore, we should pay more attention and carry out targeted health education in the community to these populations with overall poor KAP towards TB, and develop effective strategies and measures to realize the End TB Plan.

Opinion Evolution with Information Quality of Public Person and Mass Acceptance Threshold

Public persons are nodes with high attention to public events, and their opinions can directly affect the development on events. However, because of rationality, the followers' acceptance to the public persons' opinions will depend on the information trait on public persons' opinions and own comprehension. To study how different opinions of the public persons guide different followers, we build an opinion dynamics model, which would provide a theoretical method for public opinion management. Based on the classical bounded confidence model, we extract the information quality variables and individual trust threshold and introduce them to construct our two-stage opinion evolution model. And then in the simulation experiments, we analyze the different effects of opinion information quality, opinion release time, and frequency on public opinion by adjusting the different parameters. Finally, we added a case to compare real data, the data from classical model simulation and the data from improved model simulation to verify the effectiveness on our model. The research found that the more sufficient the argument and the more moderate the attitude, the more likely to guide the public opinion. If public person holds different opinions and different information quality, he should choose different time to present his opinion to achieve ideal guide effect. When public person holds neutral opinion and the information quality is relatively general, he/she can intervene in public opinion as soon as possible to control final public opinion; when public person holds extreme opinion and the information quality is relatively high, he/she can choose to express opinion after a certain period on public opinion evolution, which is conducive to improve the guidance effect on public opinion. The frequency of releasing opinions of public person consistently has a positive impact on the final public opinion.

Weight stigma from romantic partners: Its relations with maladaptive and adaptive coping and depressive symptoms

Social devaluation of being overweight is common in daily life, but little is known about the weight stigma in romantic relationships. The present study investigated the roles of maladaptive and adaptive coping strategies in the relation between the experience of weight stigma in romantic relationships and depressive symptoms in men and women, respectively. Analyses of gender differences and structural equation modeling yielded several findings. First, while men and women experienced similar levels of weight stigma from their romantic partners, women were more likely to use exercise avoidance, disengagement coping, and reappraisal coping strategies, and to exhibit more depressive symptoms than men. Second, men who experienced weight stigma tended to cope with it through exercise avoidance and disengagement coping, which were related to greater depressive symptoms. Men also coped with weight stigma adaptively via reappraisal coping, which was additionally associated with more positive affect. Third, the relation between the experience of weight stigma and depressive symptoms in women was only explained by using disengagement coping. These findings extend the understanding of weight stigma to a specific context and provide some insight that future interventions to reduce the impacts of weight stigma should be tailored accordingly for men and women.

Social influence and external feedback control in humans

This article aims to unravel the dynamics of social influence by examining the processes that occur when one person is the target of another's influence. We hypothesized that these processes are part of a feedback loop system in an individual. This loop involves the situation (input), a goal state (reference), a comparator, a selection mechanism, a feedback predictor, and an action (output). Each element can become the target of social influence, and different types of social influence can be classified and explained by how these elements are targeted. For instance, attempting to persuade another person with strong arguments targets the goal state of the affected individual, while obedience targets the selection mechanism, and violence targets the action. In summary, this article aims to categorize, order, and explain phenomena in social influence research using a feedback loop framework focusing on the influenced individual.

Stuck on Intergroup Attitudes: The Need to Shift Gears to Change Intergroup Behaviors

Decades of research on how to improve intergroup relations have primarily examined ways to change prejudiced attitudes. However, this focus on negative intergroup attitudes has yielded few effective solutions. Because intergroup relations are shaped by behavior during intergroup interactions, it is necessary to identify constructs that have a strong causal impact on intergroup behavior change. In this article, I will discuss evidence showing that intergroup attitude change is neither a sufficient nor necessary cause for intergroup behavior change. Empirical research suggests that intergroup attitudes are difficult to change and have a limited effect on intergroup behavior. I also distinguish between constructs that primarily affect intergroup attitude change (e.g., counterstereotypical exemplars, evaluative conditioning) and constructs that primarily affect intergroup behavior change (e.g., social norms, self-efficacy). Further, suggestions for future research will also be provided to advance understanding of the various psychological constructs that influence intergroup behavior change, which will help us develop effective methods of improving intergroup relations.

Racial disparities in cancer genetic counseling encounters: study protocol for investigating patient-genetic counselor communication in the naturalistic clinical setting using a convergent mixed methods design

BACKGROUND

Despite decades of effort to reduce racial cancer disparities, Black people continue to die at higher rates from cancer than any other U.S. racial group. Because prevention is a key to the cost-effective and long-term control of cancer, the potential for cancer genetic counseling to play a central role in reducing racial cancer disparities is high. However, the benefits of genetic counseling are not equitable across race. Only 2% of genetic counselors self-identify as Black/African American, so most genetic counseling encounters with Black patients are racially discordant. Patients in racially discordant medical interactions tend to have poorer quality patient-provider communication and receive suboptimal clinical recommendations. One major factor that contributes to these healthcare disparities is racial bias. Drawing on findings from prior research, we hypothesize that genetic counselor providers' implicit racial prejudice will be associated negatively with the quality of patient-provider communication, while providers' explicit negative racial stereotypes will be associated negatively with the comprehensiveness of clinical discussions of cancer risk and genetic testing for Black (vs. White) patients.

METHODS

Using a convergent mixed methods research design, we will collect data from at least 15 genetic counseling providers, from two different institutions, and their 220 patients (approximately equal number of Black and White patients per provider) whose appointments are for a hereditary cancer condition. The data sources will include two provider surveys, two patient surveys, video- and/or audio-recordings of genetic counseling encounters, and medical chart reviews. The recorded cancer genetic counseling in-person and telehealth encounters will be analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively to assess the quality of patient-provider communication and the comprehensiveness of clinical discussion. Those data will be linked to pre- and post-encounter survey data and data from medical chart reviews to test our hypotheses.

DISCUSSION

Findings from this multi-site study will highlight specific aspects of cancer genetic counseling encounters (patient-provider communication and clinical recommendations) that are directly associated with patient-centered outcomes (e.g., satisfaction, trust, genetic testing completion). Patient-provider communication and clinical recommendations are modifiable factors that can be integrated into current genetic counseling training curricula and thus can have immediate impact on genetic counseling training and practice.

The social contagion of prosocial behaviour: How neighbourhood blood donations influence individual donation behaviour

Life-saving transfusions and numerous other medical treatments are enabled by a minority of people that donate blood. But why do some people repeatedly engage in such prosocial behaviour, especially when it is costly to themselves? This study examines to what extent social contagion within neighbourhoods - changing behaviour in response to the behaviour of others - affects repeated blood donation behaviour. We draw on longitudinal survey and register data from a representative sample of blood donors in the Netherlands from 2007 to 2014 (N = 15,090). Using a panel data model and an instrumental variable approach, we find that donors are positively affected by donations made by other donors living in their neighbourhood. This effect does not seem to be mediated by normative or informational social influence. Exploratory analysis further attributes this finding to social contagion within donor couples. Our study contributes to the literature on repeated blood donation behaviour, and can inform retention strategies of blood banks.

AACP faculty affairs standing committee report of strategies for faculty self-advocacy and promotion

OBJECTIVES

The 2020-2021 American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy Faculty Affairs Standing Committee (FASC) was charged with identifying how faculty can self-advocate and promote themselves in a social influence context.

FINDINGS

The FASC identified social influence and persuasion theories and strategies that can be used by faculty to initiate self-advocacy discussions and collaborations. Social influence and persuasion theories can provide a framework for research and scholarship or for beginning discussions regarding self-advocacy.

SUMMARY

This FASC report describes the Committee charge, background information, and an overview of social influence theories and how these theories can be applied in academic pharmacy. The report concludes with a summary of issues for follow-up to the Committee's work.

A Pre-Implementation Enhancement Strategy to Increase the Yield of Training and Consultation for School-Based Behavioral Preventive Practices: a Triple-Blind Randomized Controlled Trial

As the most common setting where youth access behavioral healthcare, the education sector frequently employs training and follow-up consultation as cornerstone implementation strategies to promote the implementation of evidence-based practices (EBPs). However, these strategies alone are not sufficient to promote desirable implementation (e.g., intervention fidelity) and youth behavioral outcomes (e.g., mitigated externalizing behaviors). Theory-informed pragmatic pre-implementation enhancement strategies (PIES) are needed to prevent the lackluster outcomes of training and consultation. Specifically, social cognitive theory explicates principles that inform the design of PIES content and specify mechanisms of behavior change (e.g., "intentions to implement" (ITI)) to target increasing providers' responsiveness to training and consultation. This triple-blind parallel randomized controlled trial preliminarily examined the efficacy of a pragmatic PIES based on social cognitive theories (SC-PIES) to improve implementation and youth behavioral outcomes from universal preventive EBPs in the education sector. Teachers from a diverse urban district were recruited and randomly assigned to the treatment (SC-PIES; ntreatment = 22) or active control condition (administrative meeting; ncontrol = 21). Based on the condition assigned, teachers received the SC-PIES or met with administrators before their EBP training. We assessed teachers' ITI, intervention fidelity, and youth behavioral outcome (academic engagement as an incompatible behavior to externalizing disorders) at baseline, immediately after training, and 6 weeks afterward. A series of ANCOVAs detected sizeable effects of SC-PIES, where teachers who received SC-PIES demonstrated significantly larger improvement in their ITI, intervention fidelity, and youth behaviors as compared to the control. Conditional analyses indicated that teachers' ITI partially mediated the effect of SC-PIES on intervention fidelity, which in turn led to improved youth behaviors. Findings suggest that theory-informed pragmatic PIES targeting providers' ITI can boost their responsiveness to implementation strategies, as reflected in improved implementation behaviors and youth behavioral outcomes. The results have implications for targeting motivational mechanisms of behavior change and situating preventive implementation strategies at the intersection between the preparation and active implementation stages of an implementation process. Limitations and implications for research and practice are discussed. Clinicaltrials.gov: NCT05240222. Registered on: 2/14/2022. Retrospectively registered.  https://clinicaltrials.gov/show/NCT05240222.

The project implicit international dataset: Measuring implicit and explicit social group attitudes and stereotypes across 34 countries (2009-2019)

For decades, researchers across the social sciences have sought to document and explain the worldwide variation in social group attitudes (evaluative representations, e.g., young-good/old-bad) and stereotypes (attribute representations, e.g., male-science/female-arts). Indeed, uncovering such country-level variation can provide key insights into questions ranging from how attitudes and stereotypes are clustered across places to why places vary in attitudes and stereotypes (including ecological and social correlates). Here, we introduce the Project Implicit:International (PI:International) dataset that has the potential to propel such research by offering the first cross-country dataset of both implicit (indirectly measured) and explicit (directly measured) attitudes and stereotypes across multiple topics and years. PI:International comprises 2.3 million tests for seven topics (race, sexual orientation, age, body weight, nationality, and skin-tone attitudes, as well as men/women-science/arts stereotypes) using both indirect (Implicit Association Test; IAT) and direct (self-report) measures collected continuously from 2009 to 2019 from 34 countries in each country's native language(s). We show that the IAT data from PI:International have adequate internal consistency (split-half reliability), convergent validity (implicit-explicit correlations), and known groups validity. Given such reliability and validity, we summarize basic descriptive statistics on the overall strength and variability of implicit and explicit attitudes and stereotypes around the world. The PI:International dataset, including both summary data and trial-level data from the IAT, is provided openly to facilitate wide access and novel discoveries on the global nature of implicit and explicit attitudes and stereotypes.

Social conformity is associated with inter-trial electroencephalogram variability

Human society encompasses diverse social influences, and people experience events differently and may behave differently under such influence, including in forming an impression of others. However, little is known about the underlying neural relevance of individual differences in following others' opinions or social norms. In the present study, we designed a series of tasks centered on social influence to investigate the underlying relevance between an individual's degree of social conformity and their neural variability. We found that individual differences under the social influence are associated with the amount of inter-trial electroencephalogram (EEG) variability over multiple stages in a conformity task (making face judgments and receiving social influence). This association was robust in the alpha band over the frontal and occipital electrodes for negative social influence. We also found that inter-trial EEG variability is a very stable, participant-driven internal state measurement and could be interpreted as mindset instability. Overall, these findings support the hypothesis that higher inter-trial EEG variability may be related to higher mindset instability, which makes participants more vulnerable to exposed external social influence. The present study provides a novel approach that considers the stability of one's endogenous neural signal during tasks and links it to human social behaviors.

A Culturally Tailored Narrative Decreased Resistance to COVID-19 Vaccination Among Latinas

PURPOSE

This study tested the relative efficacy of a culturally tailored dramatic narrative promoting COVID-19 vaccination in changing attitudes and behavioral intent among unvaccinated Latinas compared to a nonnarrative control containing similar information.

DESIGN

A pretest-posttest experimental study with unvaccinated Latinas randomly assigned to watch either a dramatic narrative featuring Latina characters countering prevalent myths about COVID-19 vaccines or a nonnarrative film containing similar information (control condition).

SETTING

The experiment was hosted online with the films embedded in the survey.

PARTICIPANTS

Three-hundred-ninety adult Latinas living in the United States (mean age = 33.4 years; SD = 11.2) who had not been vaccinated against COVID-19 despite being eligible. At pretest, 57.7% were hesitant and 42.3% were resistant (refusing) to get vaccinated.

MEASURES

Self-reported measures of engagement with the film, COVID-19 vaccine attitudes, and intent to get vaccinated within 30 days at pretest and posttest.

RESULTS

Resistant women were significantly more engaged in the dramatic narrative than the nonnarrative control film (P = .03). Being engaged in a film predicted more positive post-viewing attitudes toward the vaccine (b = .28; P < .001) and higher intent to get vaccinated (b = 2.34, P < .001).

CONCLUSION

Using culturally tailored stories to promote healthy behaviors such as vaccination can be an effective way of reaching resistant audiences.

Identity effects in social media

Identity cues appear ubiquitously alongside content in social media today. Some also suggest universal identification, with names and other cues, as a useful deterrent to harmful behaviours online. Unfortunately, we know little about the effects of identity cues on opinions and online behaviours. Here we used a large-scale longitudinal field experiment to estimate the extent to which identity cues affect how people form opinions about and interact with content online. We randomly assigned content produced on a social news aggregation website to 'identified' and 'anonymous' conditions to estimate the causal effect of identity cues on how viewers vote and reply to content. The effects of identity cues were significant and heterogeneous, accounting for between 28% and 61% of the variation in voting associated with commenters' production, reputation and reciprocity. Our results also showed that identity cues cause people to vote on content faster (consistent with heuristic processing) and to vote according to content producers' reputations, production history and reciprocal votes with content viewers. These results provide evidence that rich-get-richer dynamics and inequality in social content evaluation are mediated by identity cues. They also provide insights into the evolution of status in online communities. From a practical perspective, we show via simulation that social platforms may improve content quality by including votes on anonymized content as a ranking signal.

Predicting Fact-Checking Health Information Before Sharing Among People with Different Levels of Altruism: Based on the Influence of Presumed Media Influence

Background

Pervasive health misinformation on social media affects people's health. Fact-checking health information before it is shared is an altruistic behavior that effectively addresses health misinformation on social media.

Purpose

Based on the influence of presumed media influence (IPMI), this study serves two purposes: The first is to investigate factors that influence social media users' decisions to fact-check health information before sharing it in accordance with the IPMI model. The second is to explore different predictive powers of the IPMI model for individuals with different levels of altruism.

Methods

This study conducted a questionnaire survey of 1045 Chinese adults. Participants were divided into either a low-altruism group (n = 545) or a high-altruism group (n = 500) at the median value of altruism. A multigroup analysis was conducted with R Lavaan package (Version 0.6-15).

Results

All of the hypotheses were supported, which confirms the applicability of the IPMI model in the context of fact-checking health information on social media before sharing. Notably, the IPMI model yielded different results for the low- and high-altruism groups.

Conclusion

This study confirmed the IPMI model can be employed in the context of fact-checking health information. Paying attention to health misinformation can indirectly affect an individual's intention to fact-check health information before they share it on social media. Furthermore, this study demonstrated the IPMI model's varying predictive powers for individuals with different altruism levels and recommended specific strategies health-promotion officials can take to encourage others to fact-check health information.

Reducing socio-ecological conflict using social influence modelling

Polarisation of opinions across communities can lead to social conflict, reputational damage and the disruption of operations and markets. Social influence models have been widely used to better understand processes driving conflict from a theoretical perspective. Using aquaculture as a case study, we demonstrate how such models can be extended to accurately hindcast the transition from population consensus to high conflict, including observed catastrophic tipping points. We then use the model to quantitatively evaluate strategies aimed at reducing aquaculture conflict. We found that persuasive advocacy was ineffective and often counterproductive, whereas meaningful engagement, collaborative learning and improving scientific literacy targeted broadly across the population was effective in moderating opinions and reducing conflict. When such messaging was targeted too narrowly or too infrequently, it tended to be negated by ongoing exchange of misinformation within the population. Both the modelling approach and lessons on effective communication strategies are relevant to a broad range of environmental conflicts.

Measuring the effects of misinformation exposure and beliefs on behavioural intentions: a COVID-19 vaccination study

Misinformation has been a pressing issue since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, threatening our ability to effectively act on the crisis. Nevertheless, little is known about the actual effects of fake news on behavioural intentions. Does exposure to or belief in misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines affect people's intentions to receive such a vaccine? This paper attempts to address this question via three preregistered experiments (N = 3463). In Study 1, participants (n = 1269) were exposed to fabricated pro- or anti-vaccine information or to neutral true information, and then asked about their intentions to get vaccinated. In Study 2, participants (n = 646) were exposed to true pro- and anti-vaccine information, while Study 3 (n = 1548) experimentally manipulated beliefs in novel misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines by increasing exposure to the information. The results of these three studies showed that exposure to false information about the vaccines had little effect on participants' intentions to get vaccinated, even when multiple exposures led them to believe the headlines to be more accurate. An exploratory meta-analysis of studies 1 and 3, with a combined sample size of 2683, showed that exposure to false information both supporting and opposing COVID-19 vaccines actually increased vaccination intentions, though the effect size was very small. We conclude by cautioning researchers against equating exposure to misinformation or perceived accuracy of false news with actual behaviours.

Using social media data in diabetes care: bridging the conceptual gap between health providers and the network population

Background

Patients with diabetes who have poor health literacy about the disease may exhibit poor compliance and thus subsequently experience more complications. However, the conceptual gap of diabetes between health providers and the general population is still not well understood. Decoding concerns about diabetes on social media may help to close this gap.

Methods

Social media data were collected from the OpView social media platform. After checking the quality of the data, we analyzed the trends in people’s discussions on the internet using text mining. The natural language process includes word segmentation, word counting and counting the relationships between the words. A word cloud was developed, and clustering analyses were performed.

Results

There were 19,565 posts about diabetes collected from forums, community websites, and Q&A websites in the summer (June, July, and August) of 2017. The three most popular aspects of diabetes were diet (33.2%), life adjustment (21.2%), and avoiding complications (15.6%). Most discussions about diabetes were negative. The negative/positive ratios of the top three aspects were avoiding complications (7.60), problem solving (4.08), and exercise (3.97). In terms of diet, the most popular topics were Chinese medicine and special diet therapy. In terms of life adjustment, financial issues, weight reduction, and a less painful glucometer were discussed the most. Furthermore, sexual dysfunction, neuropathy, nephropathy, and retinopathy were the most worrisome issues in avoiding complications. Using text mining, we found that people care most about sexual dysfunction. Health providers care about the benefits of exercise in diabetes care, but people are mostly concerned about sexual functioning.

Conclusion

A conceptual gap between health providers and the network population existed in this real-world social media investigation. To spread healthy diabetic education concepts in the media, health providers might wish to provide more information related to the network population’s actual areas of concern, such as sexual function, Chinese medicine, and weight reduction.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12875-022-01846-0.

Does the clerkship/internship in psychiatry affect medical students' level of knowledge about schizophrenia, attitudes, and beliefs toward schizophrenia and other mental disorders?

Undergraduate medical students' attitudes and beliefs toward mental illnesses are a crucial phenomenon as these students will be care providers of the future. The current study aimed to analyze whether the psychiatry clerkship/internship affects these students' level of knowledge about schizophrenia as well as their attitudes and beliefs toward schizophrenia and other mental illnesses. A total of 158 medical students, 92 in their fifth year and 66 in their sixth year, were included in the study. The participants completed the Knowledge About Schizophrenia Questionnaire (KASQ), Beliefs toward Mental Illness Scale (BMI), and Attitudes toward People with Mental Disorders Scale (APMDS) before and after the psychiatry clerkship/internship. The KASQ and APMDS total scores were significantly higher whereas BMI and BMI-Dangerousness subscale scores were significantly lower after the clerkship/internship in psychiatry. Postclerkship/internship KASQ total scores were negatively correlated with BMI total scores and BMI-Dangerousness subscale scores. Additionally, BMI total scores and APMDS total scores were also negatively correlated. Although the change in KASQ scores was significantly associated with the decrease in BMI total scores after the clerkship/internship, it was not associated with the increase in APMDS total score in the hierarchical multiple linear regression analysis. In conclusion, the present study revealed that knowledge about schizophrenia and attitudes and beliefs toward mental illnesses improved significantly after the clerkship/internship in psychiatry. While improvement in medical students' knowledge about schizophrenia and mental illnesses is a predictor of the decrease in negative beliefs about mental illnesses, a similar relationship was not found regarding attitudes. This study not only provides information about the relationship between knowledge about schizophrenia and attitudes and beliefs about mental illness but also highlights the need to consider the multifactorial nature of attitudes when developing intervention programs for medical students.

Energy Literacy and Its Determinants among Students within the Context of Public Intervention in Poland

This paper presents the results of a survey concerning energy literacy conducted among a group of 913 students at the Cracow University of Economics in Poland—a country whose power system is still primarily based on burning coal and where the prospects of the closure of the mining sector present particularly difficult challenges. The aim of the study was to investigate specific aspects of energy literacy such as knowledge, behaviour, attitudes, and self-efficacy, and to determine what affects them using multivariate linear regression analysis. According to the findings, the primary factors determining energy literacy are gender, going away from home to study, and the experience of energy poverty. Self-efficacy, attitude, and the pro-ecological elements of both attitude and knowledge are the factors that have the most impact on students’ behaviour. The absence of a statistically significant impact of general knowledge on behaviour is a critical presumption for developing the premises of an effective pro-environment energy strategy. Based on the data, we present a number of policy proposals, including informational activity as well as ways of influencing the emotional and behavioural domains.

EXPRESS: Combining Refutations and Social Norms Increases Belief Change

Misinformed beliefs are difficult to change. Refutations that target false claims typically reduce false beliefs, but tend to be only partially effective. In this study, a social norming approach was explored to test whether provision of peer norms could provide an alternative or complementary approach to refutation. Three experiments investigated whether a descriptive norm-by itself or in combination with a refutation-could reduce the endorsement of worldview-congruent claims. Experiment 1 found that using a single point estimate to communicate a norm affected belief but had less impact than a refutation. Experiment 2 used a verbally-presented distribution of four values to communicate a norm, which was largely ineffective. Experiment 3 used a graphically-presented social norm with 25 values, which was found to be as effective at reducing claim belief as a refutation, with the combination of both interventions being most impactful. These results provide a proof of concept that normative information can aid in the debunking of false or equivocal claims, and suggests that theories of misinformation processing should take social factors into account.

A Study on Conformity Appeal Attributes and Social Contagion of Beauty-Focused One-Person Media in Sustainable E-Commerce

In the beauty industry, the use of one-person media is making new, more active relationships that differ from those of past online services and information sharing. Therefore, in this study, we developed conformity appeal attributes in one-person media, identifying their effects on information diffusion behavior through social conformity and collaborative innovation networks, to investigate the social contagion effect of information in beauty-focused one-person media and develop a model by connecting them to the conformity threshold of individuals influenced by others. In this study, a total of 694 complete samples of experienced consumers in the beauty-focused one-person media category were selected, and research questions were verified through reliability and validity tests, path analysis, and measurement model analysis. The research results are as follows. First, conformity appeal attributes of beauty-focused one-person media in terms of information cascade, utility value efficiency, reference group influence, and subnetwork structure significantly affected social imitation conformity. However, only subnetwork structure significantly affected social connection conformity. Similarly, only reference group influence and subnetwork structure significantly affected social comparative conformity. Second, social imitation conformity, social connection conformity, and social comparative conformity in beauty-focused one-person media significantly affected cocreation. Third, cocreation in beauty-focused one-person media significantly affected information diffusion behavior. The detailed use of the conformity appeal attribute factors shown in the above results will be combined with functional changes for online and mobile services of beauty companies, and it will be a driving force to create new value for the network. Moreover, the results of this study not only enable social connection among members within the reference group of beauty-focused one-person media but are also applied as an effective phenomenon to explain the continuous maintenance, reinforcement, and expansion of these relationships, thereby enabling researchers to achieve theoretical expansion and evaluation of relevant variables.

Nurses’ Attitudes towards Selected Social Groups: Cross-Sectional Survey among Polish Nurses

Background: Attitude is a relatively permanent inclination towards a positive or negative evaluation of a given social or physical object, which determines a person’s disposition towards their surrounding social reality and informs his/her behavior. Aims: The aim of this study is to assess the attitudes of nursing staff, in terms of the emotional and behavioral components, in relation to selected social groups: a Roma person, a hearing-impaired person, a Muslim, and a person of a homosexual orientation. Design: This cross-sectional study was conducted by means of an Internet questionnaire. Methods: This study included 3900 nurses from Poland who were participants in social networking sites and discussion groups for nurses. The study data were collected by using a self-constructed survey questionnaire. The results were reported using the STROBE Checklist. Results: The following scale was adopted: mean 1.0–3.5—positive attitude, 3.6–6.0—negative attitude. Respondents showed positive attitudes towards patient groups (1.67–2.30), the least positive being towards Muslims (2.30) and Roma (2.21). The respondents predicted that during the performance of professional activities, they would have the biggest problem with a person of homosexual orientation (22.1%) or a Muslim person (19.0%). The results show that the age and length of service most often influence attitudes towards patients from different social groups. Conclusions: Respondents with a longer period of work experience and respondents with lower education, despite declaring positive attitudes towards the surveyed social groups, expressed negative statements towards Muslims and homosexuals. Cultural education during the undergraduate and postgraduate studies of nursing staff is essential. Impact Statement: This research indicates that the lesser the need for direct involvement in interactions with patients from other groups, the greater the willingness to accept the situation in which care is provided.

Conflicting social influences regarding controversial information systems: the case of online dating

Purpose

Controversial information systems (IS) represent a unique context in which certain members of a user's social circle may endorse the use of a system while others object to it. The purpose of this paper is to explore the simultaneous and often conflicting roles of such positive and negative social influences through social learning and ambivalence theories in shaping user adoption intention of a representative case of controversial IS, namely online dating services (ODS).

Design/methodology/approach

The model was tested with two empirical studies using structural equation modeling techniques. The data of these studies were collected from 451 (Study 1) and 510 (Study 2) single individuals (i.e. not in a relationship).

Findings

(1) Positive social influence has a stronger impact on perceived benefits and adoption intention, while negative social influence exerts a greater impact on perceived risks; (2) positive and negative social influences affect adoption intention toward ODS differently, through benefit and risk assessments; and (3) ambivalence significantly negatively moderates the effects of social influences on adoption.

Originality/value

This study enriches and extends the IS use, ambivalence theory, prospect theory, and social learning theory research streams. Furthermore, this study suggests that it is necessary to focus on not only the oft-considered positive but also negative social influences in IS research.

Epistemic Communities under Active Inference

The spread of ideas is a fundamental concern of today’s news ecology. Understanding the dynamics of the spread of information and its co-option by interested parties is of critical importance. Research on this topic has shown that individuals tend to cluster in echo-chambers and are driven by confirmation bias. In this paper, we leverage the active inference framework to provide an in silico model of confirmation bias and its effect on echo-chamber formation. We build a model based on active inference, where agents tend to sample information in order to justify their own view of reality, which eventually leads to them to have a high degree of certainty about their own beliefs. We show that, once agents have reached a certain level of certainty about their beliefs, it becomes very difficult to get them to change their views. This system of self-confirming beliefs is upheld and reinforced by the evolving relationship between an agent’s beliefs and observations, which over time will continue to provide evidence for their ingrained ideas about the world. The epistemic communities that are consolidated by these shared beliefs, in turn, tend to produce perceptions of reality that reinforce those shared beliefs. We provide an active inference account of this community formation mechanism. We postulate that agents are driven by the epistemic value that they obtain from sampling or observing the behaviours of other agents. Inspired by digital social networks like Twitter, we build a generative model in which agents generate observable social claims or posts (e.g., ‘tweets’) while reading the socially observable claims of other agents that lend support to one of two mutually exclusive abstract topics. Agents can choose which other agent they pay attention to at each timestep, and crucially who they attend to and what they choose to read influences their beliefs about the world. Agents also assess their local network’s perspective, influencing which kinds of posts they expect to see other agents making. The model was built and simulated using the freely available Python package pymdp. The proposed active inference model can reproduce the formation of echo-chambers over social networks, and gives us insight into the cognitive processes that lead to this phenomenon.

A neurobiological perspective on social influence: Serotonin and social adaptation

Humans are inherently social beings. Being suggestible to each other's expectations enables pro-social skills that are crucial for social learning and adaptation. Despite its high relevance for psychiatry, the neurobiological mechanisms underlying social adaptation are still not well understood. This review therefore provides a conceptual framework covering various distinct mechanisms underlying social adaptation and explores the neuropharmacology - in particular the role of the serotonin (5-HT) system - modulating these mechanisms. This article therefore reviews empirical results on social influence processing and reconciles them with recent findings from psychedelic research on social processing to elucidate neurobiological and neuropharmacological underpinnings of social adaptation. Various computational, neurobiological, and neurochemical processes are involved in distinct mechanisms underlying social adaptation such as the multisensory process of social information integration that is crucial for the forming of self-representation and representations of social norms. This is again associated with self- and other-perception during social interactions as well as value-based decision making that guides our behaviour in daily interactions. We highlight the critical role of 5-HT in these processes and suggest that 5-HT can facilitate social learning and may represent an important target for treating psychiatric disorders characterized by impairments in social functioning. This framework also has important implications for psychedelic-assisted therapy as well as for the development of novel treatment approaches and future research directions.

The link between attitudes toward probationers and job burnout in Turkish probation officers

The goal of the current study was to investigate individual-level factors associated with job burnout among probation officers (POs) and, specifically, to examine if attitudes toward probationers were linked with job burnout in the context of the recently established probation system in Turkey. Participants (N = 115) were recruited from a probation office in Istanbul. Job burnout was assessed via three components: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and professional accomplishment. Results of structural equation modeling indicated that more favorable attitudes toward probationers were related to a lower sense of depersonalization and higher experience of professional accomplishment. However, POs' attitudes toward probationers were not associated with emotional exhaustion. Our findings are discussed in light of the present empirical literature on the contextual factors influential in job burnout. Practical implications for burnout prevention point to the potential effectiveness of working on attitudes among POs toward the people they supervise.

Ambivalent Stereotypes and Persuasion: Attitudinal Effects of Warmth vs. Competence Ascribed to Message Sources

The stereotype content model (Fiske et al., 2002) defines warmth and competence as basic dimensions of social judgment, with warmth often dominating perceptions; it also states that many group-related stereotypes are ambivalent, featuring high levels on one dimension and low levels on the other. Persuasion theories feature both direct and indirect source effects (Bohner et al., 1995). Combining both the approaches, we studied the persuasiveness of ambivalently stereotyped sources. Participants (total n = 296) read persuasive arguments attributed to groups stereotyped as either low in competence but high in warmth (e.g., housewives) or vice versa (e.g., lawyers). In Study 1, high competence/low warmth sources were more persuasive than low competence/high warmth sources. In Study 2, this pattern replicated when an accuracy motive had been induced, whereas it reversed when a connectedness motive had been induced. These source effects were direct, that is, independent of message processing. We discuss our findings in terms of the persuasiveness of warmth vs. competence of the source as being dependent on recipient motivation; we also consider theoretical implications and perspectives for future research.

Users' Willingness to Provide Information Requirements for Systems Development

Eliciting information requirements from users is critical to timely and successful development of information systems. Despite its importance, however, users may not always be willing to cooperate during the requirements gathering process because sharing the required information may be perceived by them as detrimental to their self-interests. In the present research we investigate users' willingness to provide requirements using the Theory of Planned Behavior, ethics, and anticipated regret. We develop and test a model that draws from these three theories. Data were collected from a sample of 130 respondents and analyzed using multiple regression analysis. Results support our hypotheses that behavioral considerations, ethical considerations, and anticipated regret influence users' willingness to provide information requirements. We discuss theoretical and practical contributions of our findings and implications for future research.

Virtual town halls addressing vaccine hesitancy among racial/ethnic minorities: Preliminary findings

Background

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic remains a public health priority, and vaccination is important for ending the pandemic. Racial and ethnic minorities are disproportionally affected by COVID-19 yet report high levels of vaccination hesitancy.

Objective

We conducted virtual town halls to address vaccine hesitancy among racial and ethnic minorities in South Florida.

Methods

Our approach used social influence and persuasion models. In a formative phase, we gathered meeting preferences from our communities and developed and tested our approach. In an implementation phase, we conducted 6 virtual town halls in partnership with 6 different minority-focused community-based organizations.

Results

The town halls reached 379 participants (mean age 36.6 years; 63.9% female, 33.5% male, 0.3% nonbinary; 55.8% racial or ethnic minority). Of these 379 participants, 69 completed both polls who were unvaccinated at the time. Among these nonvaccinated participants, at the prepoll, 58% reported a high likelihood of seeking vaccination, rising to 72.5% at the exit poll, which was a statistically significant change. Unvaccinated non-hesitant and hesitant groups were compared on trusted information sources and reasons and barriers for vaccination. Nonhesitant participants reported greater trust in the COVID-19 Task Force (97.3% vs. 83.3%) as a source of vaccine information than did hesitant participants. Nonhesitant participants were statistically significant more likely to endorse family safety (82.5% vs. 63.2%), community safety (72.5% vs. 26.3%), personal safety (85% vs. 36.8%), and wanting to return to a normal life (70% vs. 31.6%) as reasons for vaccination than were hesitant participants. Hesitant participants were statistically significant more likely to endorse concerns about vaccine safety (63.2% vs. 17.5%) as barrier to vaccination than were nonhesitant participants. Qualitative data revealed high consumer satisfaction with the town halls.

Conclusion

This study supports the feasibility, acceptability, and potential impact of virtual town halls for addressing vaccine hesitancy among racial or ethnic minorities; however, our approach was resource intensive, required an extensive community-university collaborative infrastructure, and yielded a small effect.

Diversity Interventions in the Classroom: From Resistance to Action

What goes into faculty decisions to adopt a classroom intervention that closes achievement gaps? We present a theoretical model for understanding possible resistance to and support for implementing and sustaining a diversity-enhancing classroom intervention. We propose, examine, and refine a "diversity interventions-resistance to action" model with four key inputs that help explain faculty's decision to implement (or not) an evidence-based intervention: 1) notice that underrepresentation is a problem, 2) interpret underrepresentation as needing immediate action, 3) assume responsibility, and 4) know how to help. Using an embedded mixed-methods design, we worked with a sample of 40 biology faculty from across the United States who participated in in-depth, semistructured, qualitative interviews and surveys. Survey results offer initial support for the model, showing that the inputs are associated with faculty's perceived value of and implementation intentions for a diversity-enhancing classroom intervention. Findings from qualitative narratives provide rich contextual information that illuminates how faculty think about diversity and classroom interventions. The diversity interventions-resistance to action model highlights the explicit role of faculty as systemic gatekeepers in field-wide efforts to diversify biology education, and findings point to strategies for overcoming different aspects of faculty resistance in order to scale up diversity-enhancing classroom interventions.

Decision making dyads and judgement overconfidence: Implications for high-risk industries

In the workplace, overconfidence is generally considered undesirable as it may increase people's propensity to take risks. In many areas (e.g., aviation, shipping, nuclear control, and driving), risk-taking is detrimental to safety. We hypothesised that decision-makers would be overconfident and, due to group polarisation, decision-making pairs would be more overconfident than single decision-makers. As was predicted, when answering a 24-item general knowledge questionnaire (d = 0.94) and a task exploring how they might reorient themselves if lost (d = 1.93), participants (N = 63) were overconfident about their performance; importantly, participants in pairs (n = 32) were more overconfident on general knowledge (Hedges' g = 0.51) and lost procedures (Hedges' g = 0.52), than were participants who completed the tasks alone (n = 31). The findings imply that in some situations, single decision-makers may exhibit less overconfidence. The safety implications for a number of areas are discussed.

How conformity can lead to polarised social behaviour

Learning social behaviour of others strongly influences one’s own social attitudes. We compare several distinct explanations of this phenomenon, testing their predictions using computational modelling across four experimental conditions. In the experiment, participants chose repeatedly whether to pay for increasing (prosocial) or decreasing (antisocial) the earnings of an unknown other. Halfway through the task, participants predicted the choices of an extremely prosocial or antisocial agent (either a computer, a single participant, or a group of participants). Our analyses indicate that participants polarise their social attitude mainly due to normative expectations. Specifically, most participants conform to presumed demands by the authority (vertical influence), or because they learn that the observed human agents follow the norm very closely (horizontal influence).

What drives people to extreme acts of generosity? What causes behaviour that is unduly spiteful? This study explored how our social decisions polarise. Participants chose whether to spend money to increase or decrease the earnings of an unknown person. Halfway through this task, they observed another agent playing. The agent took participants’ choices to the extremes: if for instance the participant was moderately generous, it spent considerable sums to help the other. Participants conformed regardless of whether the agent was a computer algorithm, a person, or a group of people. We tested several competing explanations of why this happened with the help of cognitive modelling. Our analyses identify two factors behind polarisation: willingness to comply with the experimenter expectations (social desirability), and concern about appropriate behaviour (norm conformity). Our approach provided insight into how social choices are influenced by others, and could be applied in the study of conformity in other types of decisions.

Coevolution of actions, personal norms and beliefs about others in social dilemmas

Human decision-making is affected by a diversity of factors including material cost-benefit considerations, normative and cultural influences, learning and conformity with peers and external authorities (e.g. cultural, religious, political, organisational). Also important are dynamically changing personal perceptions of the situation and beliefs about actions and expectations of others as well as psychological phenomena such as cognitive dissonance and social projection. To better understand these processes, I develop a unifying modelling framework describing the joint dynamics of actions and attitudes of individuals and their beliefs about the actions and attitudes of their groupmates. I consider which norms get internalised and which factors control beliefs about others. I predict that the long-term average characteristics of groups are largely determined by a balance between material payoffs and the values promoted by the external authority. Variation around these averages largely reflects variation in individual costs and benefits mediated by individual psychological characteristics. The efforts of an external authority to change the group behaviour in a certain direction can, counter-intuitively, have an opposite effect on individual behaviour. I consider how various factors can affect differences between groups and societies in the tightness/looseness of their social norms. I show that the most important factors are social heterogeneity, societal threat, effects of authority, cultural variation in the degree of collectivism/individualism, the population size and the subsistence style. My results can be useful for achieving a better understanding of human social behaviour and historical and current social processes, and in developing more efficient policies aiming to modify social behaviour.

Persuasión moral en el marco del posconflicto en Colombia: un estudio sobre la calidad de los argumentos y la experticia de la fuente

En el presente estudio se analiza el impacto de la calidad de los argumentos y la experticia de la fuente en la persuasión moral, así como el cambio de un juicio moral en función de un mensaje persuasivo. La investigación sobre el efecto de la calidad de los argumentos y la experticia de la fuente en la persuasión moral es escasa, a pesar de que las teorías del intuicionismo social, del proceso dual y de las convicciones morales sugieren algunos apuntes al respecto. En este trabajo, para estudiar el impacto de estos dos factores en la persuasión moral, se llevó a cabo un estudio experimental con un diseño factorial 2 (experticia de la fuente) × 2 (calidad del argumento), con la participación de 433 personas. Específicamente, para evaluar el juicio moral y su eventual cambio, se construyó un dilema moral que contrapone los fundamentos morales de daño-cuidado y justicia-reciprocidad en el marco del posconflicto en Colombia. Los resultados muestran que si bien la mayoría de los participantes presentaron resistencia a la persuasión, tanto la calidad del argumento como la experticia de la fuente facilitan la persuasión, pero de forma independiente. Los resultados permiten varias reflexiones sobre las teorías del proceso dual de la persuasión y las teorías del juicio moral.

Entrepreneurial Intention and Perceived Social Support From Academics-Scientists at Chilean Universities

Within Ajzen's Planned Behavior Theory framework, this article tests a model to estimate the predictors of entrepreneurial intention in academic scientists working in Chile. We adapted into Spanish the entrepreneurship intention questionnaire. We tested the entrepreneurship intention model on a sample of 1,027 scientists leading research projects funded by the Chilean Scientific and Technological Development Fund (FONDECYT), the country's primary scientific research grant. The results show strong empirical support for the entrepreneurship intention model proposed while highlighting some critical issues specific to entrepreneurial intention in scientists. In particular, we found an indirect effect of perceived subjective social support on entrepreneurial intention, which is mediated by entrepreneurial attitude and perceived behavioral control toward entrepreneurship. These results suggest that policies orientated toward promoting academic entrepreneurship should include developing a healthy social environment toward it, meaning that entrepreneurial intention is not only an individual but an organizational challenge. These policies should analyze the social norms guiding the scientists' reference groups to increase their effectiveness.

The evolution of strongly-held group identities through agent-based cooperation

Identity fusion represents a strongly-held personal identity that significantly overlaps with that of a group, and is the current best explanation as to why individuals become empowered to act with extreme self-sacrifice for a group of non-kin. This is widely seen and documented, yet how identity fusion is promoted by evolution is not well-understood, being seemingly counter to the selfish pursuit of survival. In this paper we extend agent-based modelling to explore how and why identity fusion can establish itself in an unrelated population with no previous shared experiences. Using indirect reciprocity to provide a framework for agent interaction, we enable agents to express their identity fusion towards a group, and observe the effects of potential behaviours that are incentivised by a heightened fusion level. These build on the social psychology literature and involve heightened sensitivity of fused individuals to perceived hypocritical group support from others. We find that simple self-referential judgement and ignorance of perceived hypocrites is sufficient to promote identity fusion and this is easily triggered by a sub-group of the population. Interestingly the self-referential judgement that we impose is an individual-level behaviour with no direct collective benefit shared by the population. The study provides clues, beyond qualitative and observational studies, as to how hypocrisy may have established itself to reinforce the collective benefit of a fused group identity. It also provides an alternative perspective on the controversial proposition of group selection - showing how fluidity between an individual's reputation and that of a group may function and influence selection as a consequence of identity fusion.