The Behavioral Science response to COVID-19 Working Group: Recommendations to promote hand washing

The novel coronavirus spreads through human interactions with people who are infected. Therefore, changing human behavior is a powerful, low cost, immediate intervention to stem the pandemic. The immediacy is critically important as advancements in medical sciences take substantial periods of time before safety and effectiveness can be documented. By contrast, behavioral scientists have amassed […]

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Sensory information, goals, and prior knowledge come together to capture attention

Imagine that you’re in the center of a busy city watching a pedestrian traffic signal for your cue to walk. The green walking man gives the go-ahead and you start walking, a police car siren sounds and its emergency vehicle lighting flashes, capturing your attention, and sending you back to the sidewalk as the police […]

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What do TikToks, the Macarena, and memory have in common?

TikToks are short videos that typically show a set of movements. Doing the Macarena requires remembering a sequence of movements to make up the dance. Our communications are full of hand gestures and body movements. These “co-speech” hand gestures are meaningful and often relate to the content of our speech. Co-speech gestures enhance the understanding of a listener, help a […]

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For a cognitive boost, offload it: Interview with Boldt and Gilbert

I met with Annika Boldt and Sam Gilbert (pictured below) to interview them about their paper recently published in the Psychonomic Society journal Cognitive Principles: Research and Implications called “Confidence guides spontaneous cognitive offloading.”  When we do something to minimize cognitive demands, we are offloading. This is especially common when we write notes and set alerts, for […]

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The Behavioral science response to COVID-19 Working Group: Recommendations to increase social distancing

We are all bombarded with the message that we should practice social distancing, but each of us has likely seen striking violations of the goal. What can behavioral sciences uniquely contribute? The recommendations detailed in the infographic and video below were made by the Behavioral Science Response to COVID-19 Working Group. The goal of the […]

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Interview with Jennifer Coane about the memorability of tweets

Jennifer Coane and I chatted about how her life as an academic has changed as a result of COVID-19, her recent paper with Kimberly Bourne, Sarah Boland, and Grace Arnold (pictured below) published in Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, and what the results of that research may mean during these challenging times. The paper is called “Reading […]

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COVID-19: Does the British public condone cell phone data being used to monitor social distancing?

Coronavirus aka COVID-19 aka severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is the cause of the current pandemic that has turned our world upside down. This virus does not discriminate between who will be infected nor who will succumb to it. At the time of writing this blog, there are approximately 1.5 million cases, over […]

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Interview with Jonathon Crystal about reducing face touches to reduce COVID-19 spread

Jonathon Crystal and I met online to talk about the first set of recommendations – to reduce face touching – made by the Behavioral Science Response to COVID-19 Working Group. Our hands are disease vectors, so by reducing the times we touch our faces, we reduce the chances of transferring the virus from our hands to […]

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A recipe for moving your physical lab to the online lab

As I write this post, the coronavirus continues to spread across the world. In response, governments have put in place recommendations to self-isolate, create social (physical) distancing, or imposed flat-out lockdowns. One obvious implication for psychological researchers is that we can no longer conduct experiments face-to-face in our labs. Many of us have therefore been […]

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COVID-19: What can we do now?

There’s much talk about no longer doing “business as usual.” As scientists who have the potential to contribute to reducing the spread of COVID-19, how do we change our ways of doing “science as usual” to rapidly, and responsibly, disseminate information to policymakers and the public? Hahn, Lagnado, Lewandowsky, and Chater (pictured below) recently wrote a […]

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