the importance of clear instructions

News media often frame refugees as a burden or threat to a community, where humanitarian stories often frame refugees as helpless people in a far-off land in need of help. Both narratives — while sympathetic — consistently situate refugees as outsiders. Our job as communicators is to shift the narrative from “us” and “them” to “we.”

A Field Guide to “Fake News” and Other Information Disorders explores the use of digital methods to study false viral news, political memes, trolling practices and their social life online. It responds to an increasing demand for understanding the interplay between digital platforms, misleading information, propaganda and viral content practices, and their influence on politics and public life in democratic societies.

done properly, facts provoke emotion better than emotion provokes emotion. Because facts are believable, whereas a display of emotion feels like manipulation. And the first emotion we want to provoke is believability.

Participants whose stated preference was to follow the doctor’s opinion had significantly lower rates of antibiotic requests when given “information first, then opinion” compared to “opinion first, then information.” Our evidence suggests that “information first, then opinion” is the most effective approach. We hypothesize that this is because it is seen by non-experts as more trustworthy and more respectful of their autonomy.

Well, if we want to sway other people to our “correct“ vision of things, we are most likely to do that by having a strong relationship with them. Ironically, it is through carefully and compassionately listening to others that we are more likely to sway their views.

Cause-and-effect statements may seem more true if the initial letters in the words are in alphabetical order because the human brain prefers patterns that follow familiar sequences.

Discarding classical solutions such as information campaigns, it offers a much simpler alternative: make the healthy options more tempting. How? By changing their names. Several research teams in the US have tried this strategy in various school canteens and they found that making the names “seductive”, catchy or funny can induce children to eat healthier.

There is more than one reason this is happening. But, one reason I think the alternative facts industry has been so effective has to do with a concept social scientists call the “backfire effect.” As a rule, misinformed people do not change their minds once they have been presented with facts that challenge their beliefs. But, beyond simply not changing their minds when they should, research shows that they are likely to become more attached to their mistaken beliefs. The factual information “backfires.” When people don’t agree with you, research suggests that bringing in facts to support your case might actually make them believe you less. In other words, fighting the ill-informed with facts is like fighting a grease fire with water. It seems like it should work, but it’s actually going to make things worse.

In the middle of a winter’s night in 2017, Frank Luntz’s cellphone alerted him to a nearby wildfire. The longtime analyst of public opinion opened his bedroom curtains and saw, less than a mile away, flames chewing the dark sky over Los Angeles. Luntz — who specializes in how the public reacts to words — saw scary evidence of a threat that he once tried to neutralize with language. In 2001, he’d written a memo of environmental talking points for Republican politicians and instructed them to scrub their vocabulary of “global warming,” because it had “catastrophic connotations,” and rely on another term: “climate change,” which suggested “a more controllable and less emotional challenge.” Last month, with a revised script, Luntz appeared before the Senate Democrats’ Special Committee on the Climate Crisis. “I’m here before you to say that I was wrong in 2001,” Luntz said. Nearby was a colorful chart of vocabulary, developed since his polling in 2009 showed bipartisan support for climate legislation. He went on: “I’ve changed. And I will help you with messaging, if you wish to have it.”

The Data Playbook Beta is a recipe book or exercise book with examples, best practices, how to's, session plans, training materials, matrices, scenarios, and resources. The data playbook will provide resources for National Societies to develop their literacy around data, including responsible data use and data protection. The content aims to be visual, remixable, collaborative, useful, and informative. There are nine modules, 65 pieces of content, and a methodology for sharing curriculum across all the sectors and networks. Material has been compiled, piloted, and tested in collaboration with many contributors from across IFRC and National Societies. Each module has a recipe that puts our raw materials in suggested steps to reach a learning objective. To help support you in creating your own recipe, we also include a listing of 'ingredients' for a topic, organised by type:

Messages focused on the economic costs or negative impacts to individuals were more effective than motivational messaging in gaining support from the public and reducing the psychological distance of an environmental issue.

research on health comm messaging effects

the continued influence effect, which is the observation that the first pieces of information people hear continue to affect what people believe, even when they later find out that information is false.

reactance

Addressing massive challenges like climate change and poverty requires that we take a long-term view and have a preventative mindset. Since these perspectives challenge the deeply ingrained ways we have evolved to think and behave, we need to pay attention to why prevention is hard to think about and navigate the cognitive road blocks that stand in the way of progress. By presenting issues and information in ways that unlock support for preventative approaches, we can galvanize the ideas and actions social and environmental change requires.

The counselors are themselves a kind of prophylaxis. Their job is to ask about parents’ worries long before anyone’s trying to vaccinate their kids at 2 months of age, to answer whatever questions come up — in other words, to inoculate against the misconceptions that might infect them online.

BETA hosted Australia’s first ever Form-a-Palooza on 28 June 2019. It was a one-day festival of forms, designed to share the latest in form design with public servants from across the Australian Government. Forms are the most common interaction between people and the government, and there are thousands of them—most still in paper. Improving forms is a simple but important way to improve service delivery and increase public satisfaction with government. Over 200 participants from 38 agencies came along to Form-a-Palooza to learn new techniques and put them into practice. We also launched a brand new framework to guide the development of good forms—the WISER framework. It’s based on the latest research, as well as our own experience working with government agencies on forms, letters and communication.

Teen vaping continues to rise across the country. Without effective intervention, we are facing a new generation of nicotine addiction. That’s why we feel it...

Fear appeals are effective. The present meta-analysis found that fear appeals were successful at influencing attitudes, intentions, and behaviors across nearly all conditions that were analyzed. Even when a moderator was unrelated to fear appeal effectiveness, fear appeals were still more effective than comparison treatments. Further, there was not one level of any moderator that we tested for which fear appeals backfired to produce worse outcomes relative to the comparison groups.

Every field in science uses the same, old, wall-of-text poster design. If we can improve the knowledge transfer efficiency of that design even by a little bit, it could have massive ripple effects on all of science. Also, poster sessions tend to suck, so here's my pitch to make them more efficient AND more fun with a new approach to designing scientific posters/academic posters that is both more usable, and easier to create!

This video explains a campaign with Brazil’s biggest football club asking people to become an immortal fan by becoming an organ donor. The campaign reduced the wait list for organs to zero.

In 2018, LSE Arena, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera analysed the engagement of Corriere readers with content touching on the controversial and polarising topic of migration in Italy. The purpose was to address one of the most difficult problems in journalism today, which can be summed up in four related questions: • Which types of journalism intensify polarisation, and which reduce it? • How can one best communicate facts? • How can we foster constructive engagement? • Are there ways to avoid playing into the media strategies of “anti-establishment” politicians who make purposefully controversial statements in order to dominate the national debate, and then attack media who criticise them as “enemies of the people” or purveyors of “fake news”?

The Redirect Method uses Adwords targeting tools and curated YouTube videos uploaded by people all around the world to confront online radicalization. It focuses on the slice of ISIS’ audience that is most susceptible to its messaging, and redirects them towards curated YouTube videos debunking ISIS recruiting themes. This open methodology was developed from interviews with ISIS defectors, respects users’ privacy and can be deployed to tackle other types of violent recruiting discourses online.