Science communication during pandemics: The role of public engagement in social media discussions

流行病期间的科学传播：公众参与在社交媒体讨论中的作用

• 批准号: 458609429
• 负责人: Professorin Dr. Nicole Krämer
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Fachgebiet Sozialpsychologie: Medien und Kommunikation
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Grants
• 资助国家: 德国
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/458609429?language=en
• 关键词: Science; communication; during; pandemics; role

During times of pandemics, it is vital that the public is well informed about the disease, its dissemination and necessary counter-measures. During the current Covid-19 crisis, direct communication by scientists proved to be more effective than general media consumption regarding the audience’s knowledge, self-efficacy and intention to adhere to the measures (Szczuka, Meinert, & Krämer, 2020, preprint). However, it has not been sufficiently addressed how this direct science communication resonates in social media and to what extend the public engagement with scientific knowledge leads to the messages being corroborated or contradicted and eroded. The goal of the proposed project is to contribute to this question by analyzing the proportion of evidence-based social media activities as well as the dissemination of emotionally toned messages (primarily focusing on fear and anger). Based on findings that pandemics are prone to the dissemination of disinformation, we further scrutinize how actual and feigned experts differ in their communication and how well laypeople can distinguish them. We will employ in-depth manual coding of social media content (communication science), apply this to – already collected - large data sets by computational methods (computer science) and analyse psychological effects and mechanisms by experimental methods (psychology).

在大流行病期间，至关重要的是，公众充分了解这一疾病、其传播情况和必要的应对措施。在当前的Covid-19危机期间，科学家的直接沟通被证明比一般媒体消费更有效，涉及受众的知识，自我效能和遵守措施的意图（Szczuka，Meinert，& Krämer，2020，预印本）。然而，尚未充分解决这种直接的科学传播如何在社交媒体中产生共鸣，以及公众对科学知识的参与在多大程度上导致信息被证实或反驳和侵蚀。拟议项目的目标是通过分析基于证据的社交媒体活动的比例以及情绪化信息的传播（主要集中在恐惧和愤怒）来解决这个问题。基于流行病容易传播虚假信息的发现，我们进一步审查了真实和虚假专家在沟通中的差异以及外行人如何区分它们。我们将采用社交媒体内容的深入手动编码（传播科学），通过计算方法（计算机科学）将其应用于已经收集的大型数据集，并通过实验方法（心理学）分析心理效应和机制。