Papers

Though the origins of neoliberalism, design, and racism are situated at disparate moments in time, these systems support, reproduce, and reify one another in the United States today. Some contempor...

Vaccinations are without doubt one of the greatest achievements of modern medicine, and there is hope that they can constitute a solution to halt the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. However, the anti-vaccination movement is currently on the rise, spreading online misinformation about vaccine safety and causing a worrying reduction in vaccination rates worldwide. In this historical time, it is imperative to understand the reasons of vaccine hesitancy, and to find effective strategies to dismantle the rhetoric of anti-vaccination supporters. For this reason, we analyzed the behavior of anti-vaccination supporters on the platform Twitter. Here we identify that anti-vaccination supporters, in comparison with pro-vaccination supporters, share conspiracy theories and make use of emotional language. We demonstrate that anti-vaccination supporters are more engaged in discussions on Twitter and share their contents from a pull of strong influencers. We show that the movement’s success relies on a strong sense of community, based on the contents produced by a small fraction of profiles, with the community at large serving as a sounding board for anti-vaccination discourse to circulate online. Our data demonstrate that Donald Trump, before his profile was suspended, was the main driver of vaccine misinformation on Twitter. Based on these results, we welcome policies that aim at halting the circulation of false information about vaccines by targeting the anti-vaccination community on Twitter. Based on our data, we also propose solutions to improve the communication strategy of health organizations and build a community of engaged influencers that support the dissemination of scientific insights, including issues related to vaccines and their safety.

Vaccinations are critical to public health but uptake levels remain suboptimal. Intellectual humility, a virtue characterized by nonjudgmental recognition of one’s own intellectual fallibility, may...

There is an urgent need for meaningful information and effective public processes at the local level to build awareness, capacity, and agency on clima…

PDF | In this article, we introduce the concept of algorithmic conspirituality to capture occasions when people find personal, often revelatory... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate

Religious and conspiracy beliefs share the feature of assuming powerful forces that determine the fate of the world. Correspondingly, they have been theorized to address similar psychological needs a...

Adding to the growing literature on the antecedents of conspiracy beliefs, this paper argues that a small part in motivating the endorsement of such seemingly irrational beliefs is the desire to stic...

This paper presents a new global dataset on contemporary witchcraft beliefs and investigates their correlates. Witchcraft beliefs cut across socio-demographic groups but are less widespread among the more educated and economically secure. Country-level variation in the prevalence of witchcraft beliefs is systematically linked to a number of cultural, institutional, psychological, and socioeconomic characteristics. Consistent with their hypothesized function of maintaining order and cohesion in the absence of effective governance mechanisms, witchcraft beliefs are more widespread in countries with weak institutions and correlate positively with conformist culture and in-group bias. Among the documented potential costs of witchcraft beliefs are disrupted social relations, high levels of anxiety, pessimistic worldview, lack of entrepreneurial culture and innovative activity.

As the world and its challenges are becoming more complex, students and practitioners alike need to develop a more nuanced understanding of how to nav…

This analysis proposes a novel method for quantifying national responsibility for damages related to climate change by looking at national contributio…

This paper assesses claims that, prior to the 19th century, around 90% of the human population lived in extreme poverty (defined as the inability to a…

Nature Communications - Floods are most devastating for those who can least afford to be hit. Globally, 1.8 billion people face high flood risks; 89% of them live in developing countries; 170...

This study explores the relationship between the adoption of industrial robots and workplace injuries. Using establishment-level data on injuries, we …

Hello again Humantific readers. This week we are returning to our Secrets of Innovation Series by sharing an overview of the Ambidexterity Continuum and how we use it conversationally.

Nature - Videoconferencing inhibits the production of creative ideas, but videoconferencing groups are as effective as (or perhaps even more effective than) in-person groups at deciding which ideas...

(2021). Skateboarder and scooter-rider perceptions of the urban environment: a qualitative analysis of user-generated content. Urban Geography: Vol. 42, No. 10, pp. 1525-1551.

(2022). Utopia, future imaginations and prefigurative politics in the indigenous women’s movement in Argentina. Social Movement Studies. Ahead of Print.

Meta-work – the work that makes work possible – is an important aspect of professional lives. Yet, it is also one that remains understudied, in particular in th...

(2022). Feral fascists and deep green guerrillas: infrastructural attack and accelerationist terror. Critical Studies on Terrorism: Vol. 15, Critical Approaches to Extreme Right Wing Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism, pp. 169-208.

(2022). Capitalism and Imperialism in the Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Century: A Critical Analysis of Conventional and Marxist Theories of Imperialism. International Critical Thought. Ahead of Print.