News
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Dean Katherine Baicker and Professor Oeindrila Dube work with an international team to highlight behavioral approaches toward combating bias and fake news, increasing cooperation, and coping with stress and isolation.

The COVID-19 pandemic represents a massive global health crisis. Because the crisis requires large-scale behaviour change and places significant psychological burdens on individuals, insights from the social and behavioural sciences can be used to help align human behaviour with the recommendations of epidemiologists and public health experts. Here we discuss evidence from a selection of research topics relevant to pandemics, including work on navigating threats, social and cultural influences on behaviour, science communication, moral decision-making, leadership, and stress and coping. In each section, we note the nature and quality of prior research, including uncertainty and unsettled issues. We identify several insights for effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic and highlight important gaps researchers should move quickly to fill in the coming weeks and months.

Associate Professor of Economics at Bogotá's Los Andes University, Leopoldo Fergusson, joins us to talk about the many issues that make Colombia such an unequal country. He also as provides us with some potential solutions, if the political and societal will exists to implement them that is. And while Leopoldo is very much Colombian, he tells us about the story behind his Scottish surname.