News by Subject Social & Behavior

A new study from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania investigated the ways that institutions control who has access to Wi-Fi. The findings indicate that powerful institutions and privileged people use quality-of-life policing -- the report and/or arrest of individuals engaged in nonviolent offenses such as loitering, noise violations, and public intoxication -- to keep those with less privilege, including people of color, from accessing resources like the internet.

Disagreement seems to spread online posts faster and further than agreement, according to a new study from the University of Central Florida. The finding comes from an examination of posts labeled controversial on social news aggregation site Reddit. To perform the study, the researchers analyzed a Reddit dataset that was collected by DARPA.

Uber and Lyft are popular on-demand ways to travel, but does that mean trains and buses are a thing of the past? Travelers prefer different modes of transportation at different times. So how can all these modes co-exist and do so successfully? New research in the INFORMS Journal Transportation Science has created a model and an algorithm to redistribute transit resources based on commuter preferences resulting in millions in savings.

Vaccine negativity and reluctance is not a recent phenomenon but, to date, little research has been done to explore the dominance of negative vaccine-related information.

What The Study Did: This community-engaged qualitative study describing Black and Latinx participants' experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic found that fear, illness and loss experienced during the pandemic motivated information seeking and mitigation behaviors, while vaccine skepticism was high, as was the demand for clearer information.

What The Study Did: In this randomized clinical trial, a physician messaging campaign was effective in increasing COVID-19 knowledge, information-seeking and self-reported protective behaviors among diverse groups.