When Public Health Campaigns Warn You, but Your Friends Like to Drink – Connecting Computational Social Science and Neuroscience to Understand Real-World Health Behavior | TheRealCompetition | Projekt | Informationsblatt | H2020 | CORDIS

Projektbeschreibung

Unseren Weg zu einer besseren Gesundheit kommunizieren

Fachleute für Gesundheitskommunikation können eine wichtige Rolle dabei spielen, Menschen zu motivieren, besser zu essen, mit dem Rauchen aufzuhören und Sport zu treiben. Eine effektive Kampagne erstellen – eine, die lange anhaltende Verhaltensänderungen und verbesserte Gesundheitsergebnisse fördert – ist nicht gerade einfach. Kampagnen stehen in einem überfüllten Medienmarktplatz im harten Wettbewerb und müssen mit sozialen Trends konkurrieren. Im EU-finanzierten Projekt TheRealCompetition wird untersucht, wie Kampagnen für die öffentliche Gesundheit in diesem Zusammenhang optimiert werden können, indem ungesunde Medien und gleichrangige Inhalte in sozialen Medien untersucht werden. In dem Projekt wird ein bahnbrechender Ansatz eingeführt, der rechnergestützte Sozialwissenschaften und Neuroimaging verbindet, um die neuropsychologischen Prozesse zu verstehen, die Kampagneneffekte erklären.

Ziel

Malleable unhealthy behaviors excessively burden global societies. Public health media campaigns could offer cost-effective, large-scale interventions, but affect behavior only minimally. To date, health campaigns are optimized to outperform alternative health campaigns in their effects on behavior (e.g. comparing gain to loss-framed messages). Yet, in real life campaigns face other competitors like campaign-related media and peer-produced content. These sources are amplified by popular social media and thus often presented in close proximity to health campaigns. Each source may favor healthy or unhealthy viewpoints, causing health campaign-consistent or -contradictory updates to an individual’s evaluation of a behavior. Ignoring real-world competitors of public health campaigns is a grave oversight that can reduce or even reverse campaign effects on behavior. I seek to understand and optimize public health campaigns in the context of TheRealCompetition, namely healthy and unhealthy media and peer content on social media. This is non-trivial. Self-reporting media exposure and psychological processes underlying media effects overburdens lay participants who struggle to recall and explain how they integrate multiple competing influences on their behavior. In a game-changing interdisciplinary approach, I connect computational social science and neuroimaging to objectively and unobtrusively quantify daily exposure to campaign-related social media content, and understand the neuropsychological processes that explain campaign effects in the context of other sources of influence. Results offer actionable recommendations for practitioners and ecologically validate basic decision-making models. This action brings my unique dual expertise in media effects and neuroscience to Europe, adds computational social science to my skills, and develops my interdisciplinary team leader skills. I will answer novel questions, broaden collaborations, and significantly accelerate my career.