Paper by Inna Smirnova, Daniel M. Romero, and Misha Teplitskiy: “Peer review is widely used to select scientific projects for funding and publication, but there is growing evidence that it is biased towards prestigious individuals and institutions. Although anonymizing submissions can reduce prestige bias, many organizations do not implement anonymization, in part because enforcing it can be prohibitively costly. Here, we examine whether nudging but not forcing authors to anonymize their submissions reduces prestige bias. We partnered with IOP Publishing, one of the largest academic publishers, which adopted a policy strongly encouraging authors to anonymize their submissions and staggered the policy rollout across its physics journal portfolio. We examine 156,015 submissions to 57 peer-reviewed journals received between January 2018 and February 2022 and measure author prestige with citations accrued at submission time. Higher prestige first authors were less likely to anonymize. Nevertheless, for low-prestige authors, the policy increased positive peer reviews by 2.4% and acceptance by 5.6%. For middle- and high-prestige authors, the policy decreased positive reviews (1.8% and 1%) and final acceptance (4.6% and 2.2%). The policy did not have unintended consequences on reviewer recruitment or the characteristics of submitting authors. Overall, nudges are a simple, low-cost, and effective method to reduce prestige bias and should be considered by organizations for which enforced-anonymization is impractical…(More)”.
Blue Spoons: Sparking Communication About Appropriate Technology Use
Paper by Arun G. Chandrasekhar, Esther Duflo, Michael Kremer, João F. Pugliese, Jonathan Robinson & Frank Schilbach: “An enduring puzzle regarding technology adoption in developing countries is that new technologies often diffuse slowly through the social network. Two of the key predictions of the canonical epidemiological model of technology diffusion are that forums to share information and higher returns to technology should both spur social transmission. We design a large-scale experiment to test these predictions among farmers in Western Kenya, and we fail to find support for either. However, in the same context, we introduce a technology that diffuses very fast: a simple kitchen spoon (painted in blue) to measure out how much fertilizer to use. We develop a model that explains both the failure of the standard approaches and the surprising success of this new technology. The core idea of the model is that not all information is reliable, and farmers are reluctant to develop a reputation of passing along false information. The model and data suggest that there is value in developing simple, transparent technologies to facilitate communication…(More)”.
The Technology Fallacy
Book by Gerald C. Kane, Anh Nguyen Phillips, Jonathan R. Copulsky and Garth R. Andrus on “How People Are the Real Key to Digital Transformation:..
Digital technologies are disrupting organizations of every size and shape, leaving managers scrambling to find a technology fix that will help their organizations compete. This book offers managers and business leaders a guide for surviving digital disruptions—but it is not a book about technology. It is about the organizational changes required to harness the power of technology. The authors argue that digital disruption is primarily about people and that effective digital transformation involves changes to organizational dynamics and how work gets done. A focus only on selecting and implementing the right digital technologies is not likely to lead to success. The best way to respond to digital disruption is by changing the company culture to be more agile, risk tolerant, and experimental.
The authors draw on four years of research, conducted in partnership with MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte, surveying more than 16,000 people and conducting interviews with managers at such companies as Walmart, Google, and Salesforce. They introduce the concept of digital maturity—the ability to take advantage of opportunities offered by the new technology—and address the specifics of digital transformation, including cultivating a digital environment, enabling intentional collaboration, and fostering an experimental mindset. Every organization needs to understand its “digital DNA” in order to stop “doing digital” and start “being digital.”
Digital disruption won’t end anytime soon; the average worker will probably experience numerous waves of disruption during the course of a career. The insights offered by The Technology Fallacy will hold true through them all….(More)”.
Belfast to launch ‘Citizen Office of Digital Innovation’
Article by Sarah Wray: The City of Belfast in Northern Ireland has launched a tender to develop and pilot a Citizen Office of Digital Innovation (CODI) – a capacity-building programme to boost resident engagement around data and technology.
The council says the pilot will support a ‘digital citizenship skillset’, enabling citizens to better understand and shape how technology is used in Belfast. It could also lead to the creation of tools that can be used and adapted by other cities under a creative commons licence.
The tender is seeking creative and interactive methods to explore topics such as co-design, citizen science, the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and data science, and privacy. It cites examples of citizen-centric programmes elsewhere including Dublin’s Academy of the Near Future and the DTPR standard for visual icons to explain sensors and cameras that are deployed in public spaces…(More)”
A little good goes an unexpectedly long way: Underestimating the positive impact of kindness on recipients.
Paper by Kumar, A., & Epley, N. : “Performing random acts of kindness increases happiness in both givers and receivers, but we find that givers systematically undervalue their positive impact on recipients. In both field and laboratory settings (Experiments 1a through 2b), those performing an act of kindness reported how positive they expected recipients would feel and recipients reported how they actually felt. From giving away a cup of hot chocolate in a park to giving away a gift in the lab, those performing a random act of kindness consistently underestimated how positive their recipients would feel, thinking their act was of less value than recipients perceived it to be. Givers’ miscalibrated expectations are driven partly by an egocentric bias in evaluations of the act itself (Experiment 3). Whereas recipients’ positive reactions are enhanced by the warmth conveyed in a kind act, givers’ expectations are relatively insensitive to the warmth conveyed in their action. Underestimating the positive impact of a random act of kindness also leads givers to underestimate the behavioral consequences their prosociality will produce in recipients through indirect reciprocity (Experiment 4). We suggest that givers’ miscalibrated expectations matter because they can create a barrier to engaging in prosocial actions more often in everyday life (Experiments 5a and 5b), which may result in people missing out on opportunities to enhance both their own and others’ well-being…(More)”
Nudging Consumers to Purchase More Sustainably
Article by Erez Yoeli: “Most consumers still don’t choose sustainable products when the option is available. Americans may claim to be willing to pay more for green energy, but while green energy is available in the majority of states — 35 out of 50 states or roughly 80% of American households as of 2018, at least — only 14% of households were even aware of the green option, and less than half of these households purchased it. Hybrids and electric vehicles are available nationwide, but still amount to just 10% of sales — 6.6% and 3.4%, respectively, according to S&P Global’s subscription services.
Now it may be that this virtue thinking-doing gap will eventually close. I hope so. But it will certainly need help, because in these situations there’s often an insidious behavioral dynamic at work that often stops stated good intentions from turning into actual good deeds…
Allow me to illustrate what I mean by “the plausible deniability effect” with an example from a now-classic behavioral economics study. Every year, around the holidays, Salvation Army volunteers collect donations for the needy outside supermarkets and other retail outlets. Researchers Justin Rao, Jim Andreoni, and Hanna Trachtmann teamed up with a Boston chapter of the Salvation Army to test ways of increasing donations.
Taking a supermarket that had two exit/entry points, the team randomly divided the volunteers into two groups. In one group, just one volunteer was assigned to stand in front of one door. For the other group, volunteers were stationed at both doors…(More)”.
New Theory for Increasingly Tangled Banks
Essay by Saran Twombly: “Decades before the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated how rapidly infectious diseases could emerge and spread, the world faced the AIDS epidemic. Initial efforts to halt the contagion were slow as researchers focused on understanding the epidemiology of the virus. It was only by integrating epidemiological theory with behavioral theory that successful interventions began to control the spread of HIV.
As the current pandemic persists, it is clear that similar applications of interdisciplinary theory are needed to inform decisions, interventions, and policy. Continued infections and the emergence of new variants are the result of complex interactions among evolution, human behavior, and shifting policies across space and over time. Due to this complexity, predictions about the pandemic based on data and statistical models alone—in the absence of any broader conceptual framework—have proven inadequate. Classical epidemiological theory has helped, but alone it has also led to limited success in anticipating surges in COVID-19 infections. Integrating evolutionary theory with data and other theories has revealed more about how and under what conditions new variants arise, improving such predictions.
AIDS and COVID-19 are examples of complex challenges requiring coordination across families of scientific theories and perspectives. They are, in this sense, typical of many issues facing science and society today—climate change, biodiversity decline, and environmental degradation, to name a few. Such problems occupy interdisciplinary space and arise from no-analog conditions (i.e., situations to which there are no current equivalents), as what were previously only local perturbations trigger global instabilities. As with the pandemic crises, they involve interdependencies and new sources of uncertainty, cross levels of governance, span national boundaries, and include interactions at different temporal and spatial scales.
Such problems, while impossible to solve from a single perspective, may be successfully addressed by integrating multiple theories. …(More)”.
Building Trust to Reinforce Democracy
Main Findings from the 2021 OECD Survey on Drivers of Trust in Public Institutions: “What drives trust in government? This report presents the main findings of the first OECD cross-national survey on trust in government and public institutions, representing over 50 000 responses across 22 OECD countries. The survey measures government performance across five drivers of trust – reliability, responsiveness, integrity, openness, and fairness – and provides insights for future policy reforms. This investigation marks an important initiative by OECD countries to measure and better understand what drives people’s trust in public institutions – a crucial part of reinforcing democracy…(More)”.
Academic freedom and democracy in African countries: the first study to track the connection
Article by Liisa Laakso: “There is growing interest in the state of academic freedom worldwide. A 1997 Unesco document defines it as the right of scholars to teach, discuss, research, publish, express opinions about systems and participate in academic bodies. Academic freedom is a cornerstone of education and knowledge.
Yet there is surprisingly little empirical research on the actual impact of academic freedom. Comparable measurements have also been scarce. It was only in 2020 that a worldwide index of academic freedom was launched by the Varieties of Democracy database, V-Dem, in collaboration with the Scholars at Risk Network….
My research has been on the political science discipline in African universities and its role in political developments on the continent. As part of this project, I have investigated the impact of academic freedom in the post-Cold War democratic transitions in Africa.
A study I published with the Tunisian economist Hajer Kratou showed that academic freedom has a significant positive effect on democracy, when democracy is measured by indicators such as the quality of elections and executive accountability.
However, the time factor is significant. Countries with high levels of academic freedom before and at the time of their democratic transition showed high levels of democracy even 5, 10 and 15 years later. In contrast, the political situation was more likely to deteriorate in countries where academic freedom was restricted at the time of transition. The impact of academic freedom was greatest in low-income countries….(More)”
Turning city planning into a game
Article by Brian Owens: “…The digital twins that Eicker’s team builds are powerful modelling tools — but, because they are complex and data-intensive, they are generally used only by experts. That’s something Eicker wants to change. “We want more people to use [these tools] in an easier, more accessible and more playful way,” she says.
So the team harnessed the Unity video-game engine, essentially a software-development workspace that is optimized for quickly and easily building interactive video-game environments, to create Future City Playgrounds. This puts their complex scientific models behind the scenes of a computer game, creating a sort of Minecraft for urban design. “You can change the parameters of your simulation models in a game and send that back to the computational engines and then see what that does for your carbon balance,” she says. “It’s still running pretty serious scientific calculations in the back end, but the user doesn’t see that any more.”
In the game, users can play with a digital version of Montreal: they can shape a single building or cluster of buildings to simulate a neighbourhood retrofit project, click on surfaces or streets to modify them, or design buildings in empty lots to see how changing materials or adding clean-energy systems can affect the neighbourhood’s character, energy use and emissions. The goal of the game is to create the most sustainable building with a budget of $1 million — for example, by adding highly insulating but expensive windows, optimizing the arrangement of rooftop solar panels or using rooftop vegetation to moderate demand for heating and cooling.
A larger web-based version of the project that does not use the game engine allows users to see the effects of city-wide changes — such as how retrofitting 50% of all buildings in Montreal built before 1950 would affect the city’s carbon footprint….(More)”.