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Communicating about COVID-19 vaccine development and safety

Purpose Beliefs that the risks from the vaccine outweigh the risks from getting COVID-19 and concerns that the vaccine development process was rushed and lacking rigor have been identified as important drivers of hesitancy and refusal to get a …

Communicating Scientific Uncertainty About the COVID-19 Pandemic: Online Experimental Study of an Uncertainty-Normalizing Strategy

BACKGROUND: Communicating scientific uncertainty about public health threats such as COVID-19 is an ethically desirable task endorsed by expert guidelines on crisis communication. However, the communication of scientific uncertainty is challenging …

Effect of information on reducing inappropriate expectations and requests for antibiotics

People often expect antibiotics when they are clinically inappropriate (e.g., for viral infections). This contributes significantly to physicians’ decisions to prescribe antibiotics when they are clinically inappropriate, causing harm to the …

Exposure to Common Geographic COVID-19 Prevalence Maps and Public Knowledge, Risk Perceptions, and Behavioral Intentions

Action bias in the public’s clinically inappropriate expectations for antibiotics

Clinical guidelines recommend that physicians educate patients about illnesses and antibiotics to eliminate inappropriate preferences for antibiotics. We expected that information provision about illnesses and antibiotics would reduce but not …

Using retracted journal articles in psychology to understand research misconduct in the social sciences: What is to be done?

This paper explores the nature and impact of research misconduct in psychology by analyzing 160 articles that were retracted from prominent scholarly journals between 1998 and 2017. We compare findings with recent studies of retracted papers in …

‘Always take your doctor’s advice’: Does trust moderate the effect of information on inappropriate antibiotic prescribing expectations?

Objectives To reduce overprescribing, health campaigns urge physicians to provide people with information regarding appropriate antibiotic use and encourage the public to trust their physicians’ prescribing decisions. We test (1) whether providing …

Learning facts during aging: the benefits of curiosity

Background/study context: Recent studies have shown that young adults better remember factual information they are curious about. It is not entirely clear, however, whether this effect is retained during aging. Here, the authors investigated …