Our latest capability “Ask Viamo Anything” is providing access to the latest AI technology to the digitally disconnected – at no cost to them. It was built and will soon be offered on the Viamo Platform. Ask Viamo Anything works on simple mobile phones without internet access. And because of its use of voice technology, it can even be used by people with low literacy — leapfrogging text-based approaches and truly democratizing access.

Results indicated that emotional shift messages generated more talk than single-valence messages because they elicited greater emotional intensity and deeper message processing.

New Metaphors is a creative toolkit for generating ideas and reframing problems.

“We tested the effectiveness of different messages aimed at addressing climate change and created a tool that can be deployed by both lawmakers and practitioners to generate support for climate policy or to encourage action,” says Madalina Vlasceanu, an assistant professor in New York University’s Department of Psychology and the paper’s lead author. The tool, which the researchers describe as a “Climate Intervention Webapp,” takes into account an array of targeted audiences in the studied countries, ranging from nationality and political ideology to age, gender, education, and income level. “To maximize their impact, policymakers and advocates can assess which messaging is most promising for their publics,” adds paper author Kimberly Doell, a senior scientist at the University of Vienna who led the project with Vlasceanu. Article: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/cr5at Tool: https://climate-interventions.shinyapps.io/climate-interventions/

We constructed brand names for diverse products with consonantal stricture spots either from the front to the rear of the mouth, thus inwards (e.g., BODIKA), or from the rear to the front, thus outwards (e.g., KODIBA). These muscle dynamics resemble the oral kinematics during either ingestion (inwards), which feels positive, or expectoration (outwards), which feels negative. In 7 experiments (total N = 1261), participants liked products with inward names more than products with outward names (Experiment 1), reported higher purchase intentions (Experiment 2), and higher willingness-to-pay (Experiments 3a–3c, 4, 5), with the price gain amounting to 4–13% of the average estimated product value.

FDA/Rescue

In one of my studies I showed that first-person internally focused narratives – that is, stories with a character in first person revealing their feelings, thoughts and motivations – heightened perceived dangers of prescription opioids, aroused anticipated guilt and promoted negative attitudes toward prescription opioids among the audience.

“significant” p-value ≠ “significant” finding: The significance of statistical evidence for the true X (i.e., statistical significance of the p-value for the estimate of the true X) says absolutely nothing about the practical/scientific significance of the true X. That is, significance of evidence is not evidence of significance. Increasing your sample size in no way increases the practical/scientific significance of your practical/scientific hypothesis. “significant” p-value = “discernible” finding: The significance of statistical evidence for the true X does tell us how well the estimate can discern the true X. That is, significance of evidence is evidence of discernibility. Increasing your sample size does increase how well your finding can discern your practical/scientific hypothesis.

Mercier and Sperber prefer the term “myside bias.” Humans, they point out, aren’t randomly credulous. Presented with someone else’s argument, we’re quite adept at spotting the weaknesses. Almost invariably, the positions we’re blind about are our own.

Why do we believe misinformation more easily when it’s repeated many times?

Linguistic accessibility is important because people in a group often speak more than one language with various degrees of confidence. People also use different varieties of the same language or create their own variety. The way a language develops in a multilingual group reflects what people need and want to communicate.

Deliberate ignorance is a potential barrier for information interventions aiming to reduce meat consumption and needs to be considered in future interventions and research. Self-efficacy exercises are a promising approach to reduce deliberate ignorance and should be further explored.

An interactive tool to help you take a behaviourally informed approach when designing your communications

The theme of the 2023 annual virtual CHASM conference is “Health is Social: Leveraging the Metaverse to Improve Public Health.” A theme throughout the conference will be the role of social connectedness in health and ways we can leverage the metaverse to strengthen social ties, social support, and tilt social norms toward healthy choices, healthy lifestyles, and healthy communities. This conference will feature keynote speakers and panelists who are studying and innovating tools of the metaverse, including social media, virtual reality, and digital technologies to help us connect in ways that solve health problems.

Since the mid-2010s, chatbots have grown in usage and popularity across the humanitarian sector. While this usage has gained traction, there is scarce information on the collective successes, risks, and trade-offs of this automation. This research addresses this gap, documenting chatbot deployments across the humanitarian sector and exploring the existing uses, benefits, trade-offs and challenges of using chatbots in humanitarian contexts. Related Resources

Introduction: As emotions are strong predictors of climate policy support, we examined multiple discrete emotions that people experience in reaction to various types of information about climate change: its causes, the scientific consensus, its impacts, and solutions. Specifically, we assessed the relationships between four types of messages and five discrete emotions (guilt, anger, hope, fear, and sadness), testing whether these emotions mediate the impacts of information on support for climate policy. Methods: An online experiment exposed participants (N = 3,023) to one of four informational messages, assessing participants' emotional reactions to the message and their support for climate change mitigation policies as compared to a no-message control group. Results: Each message, except the consensus message, enhanced the feeling of one or more emotions, and all of the emotions, except guilt, were positively associated with policy support. Two of the messages had positive indirect effects on policy support: the impacts message increased sadness, which in turn increased policy support, and the solutions message increased hope, which increased policy support. However, the solutions message also reduced every emotion except hope, while the impacts, causes, and consensus messages each suppressed hope. Discussion: These findings indicate that climate information influences multiple emotions simultaneously and that the aroused emotions may conflict with one another in terms of fostering support for climate change mitigation policies. To avoid simultaneously arousing a positive motivator while depressing another, message designers should focus on developing content that engages audiences across multiple emotional fronts.

Unfortunately, that output can seem so plausible that without a clear indication of its synthetic origins, it becomes a noxious and insidious pollutant of our information ecosystem.

One language shift that can help is moving from “audiences” to “actors.”

accessible best practices for social media content and digital communications

This manual provides a quick overview of the steps required to develop an infodemic insights report that can be used during an emergency response or for routine health programming (where so-called low-level infodemics may be more common). The steps are: 1. Choose the question that infodemic management insights could help to answer 2. Identify and select the data sources and develop an analysis plan for each data source 3. Conduct an integrated analysis across those data sources 4. Develop strategies and recommendations 5. Develop an infodemic insights report 6. Disseminate the infodemic insights report and track the actions taken.

Getting the question right is the most important component in information design, and it’s the most common point where information design goes wrong. This is because information is always relative. Always. Before you can undertake any kind of visualization exercise, you need to know what question you want to answer, and for whom. So I propose the beginnings of a theory of information relativity: 1. All information is relative, and it’s always relative: relative to the observer and the observer’s point of view; relative to the culture and its values; relative to the situation; relative to what has come before, and to what will come next. 2. The value of information is always relative because it is directly related to it’s usefulness, which depends on the user, the context and the situation. 3. Information design must therefore be driven by the context within which it will be experienced. Information design must serve the needs of real human beings doing real things. Information wants to be used.

Time/Difference/Relationships vs Head/Heart/Hands (Logical/Metaphor/Literal)

Language has the power to reinforce or deconstruct systems of power that maintain poverty, inequality and suffering. As we are making commitments to decolonization in practice, it is important that we do not forget the role of language and communications in the context of inequality. The Inclusive Language Guide is a resource to support people in our sector who have to communicate in English to think about how the way they write can subvert or inadvertently reinforce intersecting forms of inequality that we work to end. The language recommended is drawn from specialist organizations which provide advice on language preferred by marginalized people, groups and communities, and by our own staff and networks, to support us to make choices that respectfully reflect the way they wish to be referred to. We want to support everyone to feel empowered to be inclusive in their work, because equality isn’t equality if it isn’t for everyone.

Wondering how big, small, tall, long, fast, heavy, or old something is? The Measure of Things is a tool to help you understand physical quantites in terms of things you (or your audience, or your readers) are already familiar with. Need a metaphor to emphasize a written measurement? Try including a comparison to the size of a whale, or the height of the Empire State Building, or the area of a tennis court. Need to understand how big a metric or English unit really is? Try comparing it to real, tangible objects.

What is the best medium for communicating with consumers? It depends on the content, according to the latest research from Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger.

Public Health Communications Collaborative

Improve Adherence to Health Tech. Solutions The Adherence Canvas is a tool to guide and measure the consideration of adherence to improve it during the design and development of medical technology.

When it comes to reducing obesity, evidence shows that changing food environments is more effective than measures that try to educate or change the behaviour of individuals. The interventions that participants consider to be most acceptable are the same as those that they perceived to be most effective at tackling obesity. However, the interventions that were reported to be least effective and least acceptable — such as reducing portion sizes and the taxation of unhealthy foods — may actually have the greatest potential for promoting healthy eating at the population level. While we must be cautious with how we interpret correlations like this, it suggests that addressing the disconnect between the evidence base and public understanding may be a viable way of influencing public acceptability

Katie De-loyde at the University of Bristol and colleagues created three mock-ups of menus, of the sort you might see in a food delivery app. Each of these menus featured three burritos — beef, chicken and vegetarian. For each burrito, the price (the same for each), the calorie content, a Fairtrade logo, a spice indicator and a photo of the product were all included. In one mock-up, the team also included a ‘social nudge’ (something designed to encourage people to act according to social norms): the vegetarian burrito sported a gold star with the words ‘Most Popular’. In another version of the menu, each burrito was instead accompanied with an ‘eco-label’, indicating its ranking on a traffic light type scale of sustainability. The beef got a red 5 rating (for unsustainable), the chicken a yellow 3 (neither sustainable nor unsustainable) and the vegetarian a green 1 (sustainable).