RAPID: Community-wide acquisition of medical knowledge about COVID-19 under conditions of risk and uncertainty

应对COVID-19大流行可能主要取决于个人社区如何获取和传播医疗信息。鉴于医疗信息的传播、治疗和遏制战略的许多和频繁更新，这一点尤其如此。虽然知识的扩散已经研究过，很少有模型将心理学为基础的假设知识搜索，获取和传播。具体来说，他们没有充分考虑到（1）信息传播受交际语境的影响，（2）它在高焦虑、高不确定性的环境中受到严重影响，（3）在二元水平范式中获得的结果不能简单地外推到大型社交网络。这些进展的整合将解决三个关键问题：首先，高感知感染风险如何影响公众在社交网络中获取和传播医疗信息？第二，情感、社交距离和媒体消费如何影响医学知识的获取和传播？第三，在社交网络中，人们可以采用什么样的社会认知策略来增加准确信息的传播，减少错误信息的传播？这项研究的结果可以为基础设施和实践的发展提供信息，以更好地为医疗危机做好准备。COVID-19大流行提供了一个紧迫的机会，可以在病毒感染的高感知风险条件下调查社交网络中医学知识的获取和传播。该项目使用认知心理学，社会心理学和网络科学的发展来解决这些关键问题。这种跨学科方法将把个人层面的过程与整个社区获取医学知识联系起来。将组建在线社区，个人将参与一系列关于他们对COVID-19的了解的网络对话。这些交互将使用计算机中介工具SoPHIE（人类交互实验软件平台）进行，该工具允许根据实验者指定的参数设计的会话网络中的无缝通信。个人知识将在网络会话前后被测量，会话网络结构将与人们愿意提供和接受他人信息的阈值一起被操纵。该项目的进展将有利于科学家对社交网络中最佳信息传播的建模，以及公共卫生官员对在动荡时期向公众传播准确信息以努力拯救生命感兴趣。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The response to the COVID-19 pandemic may depend critically on how communities of individuals acquire and propagate medical information. This is especially true given the many and frequent updates of medical information transmission, treatment and containment strategies. Although the diffusion of knowledge has been studied previously, very few models incorporate psychologically grounded assumptions about knowledge search, acquisition, and propagation. Specifically, they do not fully consider (1) that information propagation is influenced by the communicative context, (2) that it is critically affected in high-anxiety, high-uncertainty environments, and (3) that results obtained in dyadic level paradigms cannot simply be extrapolated to large social networks. The integration of these advances will address three key questions: First, how does the high perceived risk of infection influence the lay public’s acquisition and propagation of medical information in social networks? Second, how do emotion, social distancing practices, and media consumption impact medical knowledge acquisition and propagation? And third, what socio-cognitive strategies could one employ to increase the spread of accurate information and to diminish the diffusion of misinformation in social networks? Findings from this study could inform the development of infrastructure and practices to better prepare the population for medical crises. The COVID-19 pandemic provides an urgent opportunity to investigate the acquisition and propagation of medical knowledge in social networks under conditions of high perceived risk of viral infection. This project uses developments in cognitive psychology, social psychology, and network science to address these critical issues. This cross-disciplinary approach will relate individual-level processes to community-wide acquisition of medical knowledge. Online communities will be assembled, and individuals will engage in a sequence of networked conversations about their knowledge of COVID-19. These interactions will occur using a computer-mediated tool, SoPHIE (Software Platform for Human Interaction Experiments), that allows for seamless communication in conversational networks, designed according to experimenter-specified parameters. Individual knowledge will be measured before and after networked conversations, and the conversational network structure will be manipulated together with the threshold at which people are willing to provide and accept information from others. Advances from this project will be of interest to scientists for modeling optimal information diffusion in social networks and to public health officials interested in disseminating accurate information to the public in their efforts to save lives during times of turmoil.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.