Staying at home - the interplay between behavioural synchronisation and physical distancing in prosocial behaviour

Project Information

STAY

Grant agreement ID: 101026507

DOI

10.3030/101026507

Project terminated on 30 April 2024

EC signature date 9 July 2021

Start date 1 February 2022

End date 1 August 2024

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 174 167,04

EU contribution

€ 174 167,04

Coordinated by

TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITAET GRAZ
Austria

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - STAY (Staying at home - the interplay between behavioural synchronisation and physical distancing in prosocial behaviour)

Reporting period: 2022-02-01 to 2024-01-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The project was conceived in the context of the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and efforts to contain the spread of the virus using non-pharmaceutical measures such as physical distancing. The initial overarching goal of the project was to understand how social and emotional interaction processes can sustain prosocial behaviour that prevents the spreading of a pandemic. Due to the delay in starting and executing the project, the project aim shifted considerably: in the later years of the pandemic prevention measures shifted from non-pharmaceutical intervention measures to vaccinations. Alongside this shift, new challenges emerged regarding the combination of non-pharmaceutical and pharmaceutical intervention measures, the stability of the healthcare system, and vaccination hesitancy linked to the spread of misinformation.

Within the scope of these new challenges, the project addresses three distinct issues: (i) what is the best combination of non-pharmaceutical intervention measures and vaccinations in the context of university teaching and is presence teaching feasible with new, more infectious strains of the Corona virus? (ii) Are healthcare systems able to absorb shocks to the availability of doctors, for example due to a high rate of quarantine of doctors caused by a spreading virus? (iii) How can we measure and explain the spread of misinformation particularly in online environments?

Answering these questions is important for society, as a new pandemic is only a matter of time, particularly given the higher rate of zoonotic virus transmissions due to the warming climate. New pandemics will likely follow a similar development of events, from an initial phase where non-pharmaceutical interventions are central, to a phase were vaccinations are available for parts of the population and need to be combined with non-pharmaceutical interventions to achieve the desired reduction in disease spread, to a final phase were vaccinations are broadly available and the remaining challenges are more social in nature, relating to the population's trust in the efficacy of vaccinations and associated vaccination hesitancy. The research conducted in this project contributes to an understanding of the emergent phenomena at play in all these phases.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

A core component of the project was the development of a simulation study investigating intervention measures against the spread of the virus at the project's host university TU Graz. Close collaboration with administrative staff involved in organizing the organisational response to the pandemic allowed for a tailored approach to the modelling and research questions asked. Empirical student enrollment data allowed for the construction of a detailed contact network of students. The work lead to the publication entitled "Assessment of the Effectiveness of Omicron Transmission Mitigation Strategies for European Universities Using an Agent-Based Network Model" (https://doi.org/10.1093/cid/ciac340) in the Journal of Clinical Infectious Diseases. The main finding of the study is that even with high vaccination rates among students and teachers and stringent non-pharmaceutical intervention measures, given the extreme infectiousness of later variants of the Corona virus, large outbreaks cannot be prevented in a university environment.

In collaboration with researchers from the Complexity Science Hub Vienna a simulation study was conducted, stress-testing the resilience of the Austrian healthcare system, leveraging a data set of comprehensive records of over 100 mio doctor-patient contacts over a full year in Austria. The work lead to the publication "Stress-testing the resilience of the Austrian healthcare system using agent-based simulation" (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-31766-7) in the journal Nature Communications. A core result is the considerable diversity in the resilience of the healthcare system in different regions and for different specialisations. Given that the simulation is parameterised with a comprehensive data set of the Austrian healthcare system, the insights derived from the simulations allow for a direct application of our findings to healthcare planning in Austria.

The later work in the project was mainly concerned with the development of methods for the measurement of information trustworthiness (see our article "High level of correspondence across different news domain quality rating sets", PNAS nexus, https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad286) a descriptive exploration of the information sharing practices of political elites (see our article "Social media sharing of low-quality news sources by political elites", PNAS nexus, https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac186) and an explanation of the prevalence of low-quality information by the fracturing of the concept of "honesty" into two distinct components relating to evidence- and intuition based arguments, respectively (see "From alternative conceptions of honesty to alternative facts in communications by US politicians", Nature Human Behaviour, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01691-w). A main result of this line of research is that the spread of low-quality information by political elites can be used by the use of more intuition-based language, whereas more high-quality information is linked to the use of more fact-based language patterns.

Lastly, two side-projects of the action related to Open Science and research ethics, respectively, also lead to publications: "MapOSR - A mapping review dataset of empirical studies on Open Science", F1000 data notes, http://dx.doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.121665.1 and "The right to audit and power asymmetries in algorithm auditing", EPJ Data Science, https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-024-00454-5.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Next to providing the first large-scale investigation of intervention measures in an university context, the project also created an Open Source Python package for simulations of pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical intervention measures in small environments (see https://pypi.org/project/scseirx/). The package allows for an easy extension of the simulation framework to other contexts such as schools or nursing homes, or other environments with a small (up to 100.000) number of people.

The work on the resilience of the Austrian healthcare system is groundbreaking as it provides the first application of a simulation-based risk-assessment framework otherwise only known from financial systems to a healthcare system. Of particular interest is also the interactive visualisation of the research results that enables healthcare system planners to analyse the robustness of the healthcare system in different regions and for different doctor specialisations (see https://vis.csh.ac.at/care-network-resilience/).

Lastly, the paper "From alternative conceptions of honesty to alternative facts in communications by US politicians" published in Nature Human Behaviour provides a completely new measurement instrument to detect "belief-speaking" and "fact-speaking" language components in text. Using these instruments, the article provides a new explanation for the spread of misinformation by political elites. This research line is also continued by the EU-funded PRODEMINFO project.

Belief-speaking and fact-speaking related keywords and political orientation and example tweets