Category Archives: Human Behavior

Human Behavior

How will Home Designs Change in the Age of Social Distancing? – Archinect

Home design is due for a transformation in the wake of COVID-19. Image courtesy of Flickr user Peter Alfred Hess.

The nature of many of our professions to conduct business and service in close proximity demands us to be confined to our homes and neighborhoods for indefinite period of time resulting in self-isolation or quarantine. What does this mean to design of homes? How will it upend the traditional meaning of our homes? What are the major social factors that will influence the homes of the future? These are some questions that will have to be addressed by architectural, interior, and landscape designers in the future. For one, our traditional view of home has indeed altered.

Although its been only a few weeks since the enforcement of formal lock-downs in American cities to stem the spread of the novel Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), its hard to know how long this new lifestyle will last or whether it alters our way of life for good. In this context, social distancing has become the new norm. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), this means avoiding crowded places and maintaining approximately a six foot distance from other people. This new measure has already impacted our behaviors in everyday life. The closure of large scale events such as concerts and political gatherings, as well as buildings that involve high social densities such as workplaces, places of worship, schools, and restaurants, are a direct impact of this measure.

A recent article in The New York Times maps workers who face the greatest COVID-19 risks based on two factors:exposure to diseases and physical proximity. Dentists, barbers and paramedics exhibited high physical proximity, while other professional such as lawyers and loggers were the most distant. The nature of many of our professions to conduct business and service in close proximity demands us to be confined to our homes and neighborhoods for indefinite period of time resulting in self-isolation or quarantine. What does this mean to design of homes? How will it upend the traditional meaning of our homes? What are the major social factors that will influence the homes of the future? These are some questions that will have to be addressed by architectural, interior, and landscape designers in the future. For one, our traditional view of home has indeed altered.

As human beings, we already spend over 90% of our time indoors. The application of social distancing now confines us to even more specific spaces such as our homes and immediate neighborhoods. Carol Despres, an environment behavior researcher observes that traditionally homes provide us with several behavioral affordances such as security and control, development of relationship with family and friends, reflection of oneself, a place of refuge, a signifier of personal status, and a place of ownership. Similarly another researcher, Kim Dovey provides a substantive distinction between house (as an object) and home (as a relationship between the dwellers and dwelling). The latter will absorb most stresses in our immediate future.

Ray Oldenburg in his book The Great Good Place observed that besides home (our first place) and workplace (our second place) there is virtue in third places such as churches, cafes, clubs, public libraries, bookstores or parks. With the current situation calling for self-isolation at our homes, will the notion of these places collapse onto each other? In this context, the quick embrace of remote technology is making a difference. Some years ago I had written a paper titled Places in the Virtual-Physical Continuum where I proposed that places are characterized not only by physical features (furniture, window placement) and their corresponding behaviors (eating, sitting, walking), but also virtual behaviors (internet browsing, checking e-mails, tele-conferencing etc.). In speculating about authenticity of such virtual behaviors, some phenomenologists, such as Sherry Turkle, argue that in virtual environments, people are merely "pretending" to be in a "real" place while they sit at their computer screens, much like people pretend to be at a "real" French caf when dining in Disneyland. However, Lori Kendall who has written extensively about online communities counter-argues that much like physical locations, virtual behaviors allow for near instantaneous response from physically distant others, and can provide a particularly vivid sense of place. She notes that while engaged in a virtual behavior, there is still a physical environment in which the body resides and hence the potential of two experiential worlds to co-exist simultaneously.

The advent of COVID-19 and its subsequent effects on our behaviors is indeed blurring these distinctions. While we continue to conduct our regular home behaviors, our homes are also becoming electronic hubs of teleconferencing and social media interaction, with popular apps such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, WebEx, WhatsApp, Instagram, Netflix, and Facebook to name a few. These electronic tools are expanding our behaviors to afford multi-functional activities which is blending our professional work, education, family life, healthcare, politics and faith. Some of the accommodations that we are already making at our homes include home-schooling, remote work, teleworship, telemedicine, home Yoga, movie watching, virtual parties, and home cooking to name a few. Our living rooms are becoming extended workplaces, and our altered food consuming habits are making the kitchen an extended family space.

These behavior changes might be well-served when seen through studies of the past, particularly conducted by sociologists and environmental psychologists in the 1960s and 1970s through a still-emerging discipline called environment and behavior. Irvin Altman and Robert Sommer, for example, studied human behavior relating to social distancing, privacy, personal space, and territoriality. These studies indicate how human beings create territorial defenses, even in mundane practices such as in defending a table in a cafeteria, or guarding an adjacent empty seat on a bus. Some of the social experiments conducted during this time revealed that increased distances reduced acquaintance, friendliness and talkativeness. It also revealed that an increase in eye contact counteracted these effects. Factors such as personality differences also played a part, with introverts preferring more social distancing than extroverts. Fear of rebuke tended to increase social distance while approval-seeking reduced it.

Social distancing should also be seen in the context of other behaviors such as privacy and personal space. Privacy is the virtue through which people regulate interaction with others by a biological need for personal space and territoriality. Personal space is an area of invisible boundary surrounding a persons body in which intruders may not come in, while territoriality is a specific zone characterized by physical markers or verbal signs. In the current context, the push for social distancing at our homes is creating a pull effect at our homes, altering the degrees of personal space and territoriality. Designer Christopher Alexander in his seminal book on pattern language, pointed out the need for an intimacy gradient, which suggests that as one goes deeper into a house, one finds rooms that provide increasing levels of intimacy, and decreasing level of publicness. While at home, our intimacy levels are much more forgiving, but violations of privacy can be a source of stress even within a close-knit family. It should also be noted that, in these times, there is also a dark side to such home density. According to media reports, of the 20 large Metropolitan cities, double-digit jumps were observed in 9 departments in domestic violence cases compared to previous months. Victims become inadvertently stuck in close proximity with abusers unable to reach out for safety.

While discussing behaviors, one needs to be cautious in overgeneralization, because it omits other variables such as cultural behavior. In his pioneering book House, Form and Culture, Amos Rapaport suggests that environment is shaped by cultural templates, and that cultural codes ( people beliefs, attitudes, roles and activities) need to be decoded in order to understand our built environment. Hence, social distancing factors will be impacted with the type of culture one belongs to. For instance, eastern cultures, function in a more co-operative manner and do not mind close contact, as compared to western counterparts who thrive on personal freedoms and individualism. Similar differences could be said of our attitude of living in varying social densities, urban v/s rural lifestyles, our social etiquettes, age, gender, personality and so on.

While confined in the inside of our homes, our desire to interact with outside becomes even more immediate. In this context, two design features have consistently shown in design literature to improve our well-being: nature and daylighting. A recent report by American Society of Interior Designers have correlated aspects of nature (popularly known as biophilic design), to have an impact on health and well-being, stress reduction, cognitive performance, emotion, mood, and preference. Nature lowers blood pressure and heart rate, and correlates with 8.5 percent shorter hospital stays. Similarly, adequate exposure to daylighting has indicated improvement in circadian system functioning (sleep-wake cycle), and correlates with healthcare patients requesting 22 percent less pain medication.

Another important but perhaps unpredicted effect of COVID-19 on our daily life has been our attitude towards touch, not only between people, but also between people and surfaces. With the recent media blitz on infection control, we are constantly revisiting our sense of washable surfaces in terms of wet mopping, cleaning and hosing. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that coronavirus is detectable for up to four hours on copper, up to 24 hours on cardboard and up to two to three days on plastic and stainless steel. These findings point out that we will have a renewed sense of materials in terms of hygiene and touch.

While the preceding discussion has largely focused on our own traditional forms of home, what would be the impact of social distancing in non-traditional housing types? According to Sherry Ahrentzen, from the University of Floridas Shimberg Center for Housing Studies, some examples of non-traditional housing include transitional shelter for teenage mothers (homes which share a lounge/kitchen), co-housing (homes consisting of shared dining areas, childrens play spaces, neighborhood societies), shared housing (2 or more families living in one unit with shared facilities) and hybrid housing (where residences act as both business and residence). In these facilities, boundaries between private and public spaces are challenged. In addition, what becomes of facilities such as homeless shelters where social stigma is prevalent ? It seems that social distancing will alter our attitudes towards these places even further. These are some challenges designers and policy-makers will have to address in the short and long term.

As environmental psychologists Powell Lawton and Lucille Namehow point out, the more vulnerable we are, the more environment affects us. This means that vulnerable population such as older adults, the sick, children, and persons with physical/mental disabilities will be most affected by the environments we create and live. In the context of COVID-19, these populations might be at most risk in terms of exposure to sickness, infection control, and everyday functioning. Hence, Anne Vernez Moudons description of resiliency becomes critical. Resiliency is the ability of a place to adapt to changing social structures without major disruption to the principles of structure. We need resiliency to counteract the effects of social distancing that will continue to disrupt our traditional ways of living in our homes. In the design of such homes, we might look beyond brick and mortar, by enhancing our resiliency in the form of self- sufficiency (cooking our own meals, growing our own food), tolerance and flexibility to traditional household roles (who cooks?, who gardens?), increased awareness of each others personal space and territoriality, creative use of technology in interacting with others, celebrating lifes little family moments, and a renewed sense that we are all connected, for better or for worse.

PS: An abbreviated version of this article will be featured in Florida International University News Web Forum.

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How will Home Designs Change in the Age of Social Distancing? - Archinect

Human Behavior

5 takeaways from the Earth Day 2020 town hall | CU Boulder Today – CU Boulder Today

Historic and current student leadership in sustainability at CU Boulder was a prominent theme in the CU Boulder Earth Day 2020 Town Hall. The event, which featured addresses from Congressman Joe Neguse, CU Regent Lesley Smith and leadership from across campus, was held to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the inaugural Earth Day in 1970.

Fifty years later, we must continue to forge on with the same boldness and decisiveness that this moment requires, urged Neguse, a former CU Boulder student body president.

Remote panelists included Vice Chancellor for Infrastructure and Sustainability David Kang, Interim Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Akirah Bradley and student government leadership and activists. Each shared their recorded answer to the question: Whats next for sustainability, resilience and climate?

Students, your voice has made a difference, said CU Regent Lesley Smith, announcing her addition of two student representatives to the CU System Sustainability and Deferred Maintenance Committee. Its student leaders like you who create change for our campus, our community and at times, the entire globeI hope you remain just as committed to our efforts in sustainability as the students who founded the Environmental Center 50 years ago, Bradley said.

Town Hall moderator and current CUSG Sustainability representative Travis Torline attested to that power.Never before have I had the pleasure of working in an organization that not only gives students the power to lead and succeed, but cares for them [as I do at the Environmental Center].

CU student climate strike organizers Paul Rastrelli, Alex Meldrum, and Leah Dinkin shared an invitation to friendship, camaraderie and mutual love for the earth, that is not going anywhere with fellow students and activists.

Thanks to [students], we are a leader in sustainability across college campuses, noted Bradley.

COVID-19 reminds us that radical human behavior change is possible if were convinced our lives depend on it remarked Associate Professor of Communication Phaedra Pezzullo, which they also are in the case of climate.

In my lifetime I cant recall our country or the world being so severely impacted by a single event: COVID-19, and there are many correlations that can be made with climate change, equity, migration, wildfire, flooding, and disease emergence, said Kang, sharing that what the campus is learning from our response to the novel coronavirus pandemic is being integrated into the 10-year Campus Master Plan update going on now.

Pezzullo defined sustainability as the hard and messy work of caring about all people living economically, financially and socially enriched lives, during the question and answer session, advising we [learn] from communities that have long histories of being resilient in response to these crises. Pezzullo added that the global impacts of climate change are adding a layer of urgency.

While many panelists shared difficult to face facts, hope and solutions were in abundance. The solutions to all of these problems really require all of us as a species to grow, noted Interim Dean of Arts and Sciences Jim White.

I can tell you that we will come out of this together better and stronger, assured Kang as he shared nascent plans to add 15 megawatts of solar capacity to campus and transition the Buff Bus fleet to electric power, among other campus sustainability improvements his office is planning.

Jamie McDevitt-Galles, senior program manager for Mortenson Center in Global Engineering and Sustainability Innovation Lab, shared the work of those centers on their Drought Resilience Impact Platform, a technology aimed at ending the cycle of drought emergencies in sub-Saharan Africa.

We talked a lot about the importance of community, which I think comes along with a lot of optimism, Torline summed up afterwards.

Climate change is one of the most urgent and pressing challenges of our time and ignoring the impacts it is having on our lives simply is not an option, said Neguse. Every day that we fail to act increases the cost of addressing this crisis for future generations.

In this role I have heard from staff council, faculty council and student governmenttheyre all on board [with sustainability], Smith said.

When you look at the varied backgrounds of panelists and those who sent pre-recorded videos, it really stands out that this is a campuswide effort, Torline said.

It was awesome to see what people across our campus community have accomplished before the pandemic, but even better was hearing about how our community is practicing activism during the pandemic, to better our planet, said CU Boulder senior Kate LeMair, who tuned in to watch the event.

To view the list of presenters and to access the captioned recording, visit the Campus Sustainability Summit webpage.

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5 takeaways from the Earth Day 2020 town hall | CU Boulder Today - CU Boulder Today

Human Behavior

12 movies on Netflix that critics think are terrible but audiences cant get enough of – Business Insider

captionSpenser ConfidentialsourceNetflix

Netflix said in its first-quarter earnings report on Tuesday that 85 million member households had watched its original movie Spenser Confidential. With a 38% Rotten Tomatoes critic score (and a 56% audience score), its the latest Netflix movie with poor reviews to gain popularity.

Netflix has a history of touting the popularity of some movies that critics hate. But now it doesnt need to say anything for people to notice how popular those movies are. In February, Netflix introduced daily top 10 lists of its top titles right on the service for all to see (Netflix counts a view if an account watches two minutes of a show or movie, which is how it calculates the lists).

The streaming search engine Reelgood has been providing Business Insider weekly lists of Netflixs most popular movies, based on the streamers daily lists, for the past four weeks. From Spenser Confidential to Coffee and Kareem, its clear that viewers cant get enough of critically panned Netflix movies.

But it goes beyond originals. Licensed titles like M. Night Shyamalans The Last Airbender and The Roommate, both shunned by critics and audiences upon their initial releases, have appeared on the top lists.

We compiled a list of the most rotten movies to appear on the weekly lists over the last month and ranked them from bad to worst. A movie is rotten on Rotten Tomatoes if it has a critic score below 60%. We broke any ties with audience scores (and 10 of the movies also have rotten audience scores).

Below are are the most popular bad movies on Netflix, according to critics:

Netflix description: When a deadly virus spreads throughout a small town, a team of Army doctors works to contain it before the military can execute an extreme alternative.

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: 59%

Audience score: 56%

What critics said: The irony is that Outbreak, for all its lurid finesse, ends up leaving us more dazed than terrified. Entertainment Weekly

Netflix description: A detective with a license to kill roams the Old West to wrangle Confederate war criminals and meets a pioneer woman who throws his journey off track.

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: 43%

Audience score: 51%

What critics said: Badland is ultimately too beholden to the past to be as energized as it should be. Los Angeles Times

Netflix description: After an air traffic controllers mistake results in a tragic accident, a man who lost his wife and daughter seeks answers from the man responsible.

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: 41%

Audience score: 25%

What critics said: The movie shows little interest in either dramatic context or the realities of human behavior. AV Club

Netflix description: When a flood of natural disasters threatens to destroy the world, a divorced dad desperately attempts to save his family in this doomsday thriller.

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: 39%

Audience score: 47%

What critics said: 2012 is so long, and its special effects are at once so outrageous and so thunderously predictable, that by the time I lurched from the theatre I felt that three years had actually passed and that the apocalypse was due any second. New Yorker

Netflix description: Secret Service agent Mike Banning is caught in the crossfire when hes framed for a deadly attack on the president and forced to run for his life.

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: 39%

Audience score: 93%

What critics said: If this type of no-brow entertainment is your thing, you may find something to like in Angel Has Fallen but that doesnt mean you need what these guys are reselling. RogerEbert.com

Netflix description: Spenser, an ex-cop and ex-con, teams up with aspiring fighter Hawk to uncover a sinister conspiracy tied to the deaths of two Boston police officers.

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: 38%

Audience score: 56%

What critics said: There are many things to like about Mark Wahlberg as an actor, but hes not very good when his characters have to put their thinking cap on. Newsday

Netflix description: Different versions of the same day unfold as Jack juggles difficult guests, unbridled chaos and potential romance at his sisters wedding.

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: 34%

Audience score: 38%

What critics said: At least the Italian scenery and the stranded actors look good. Just dont mistake this charmless, mirthless and shameless ripoff of Four Wedding and a Funeral and Groundhog Day for a comedy with actual laughs. Rolling Stone

Description: Looking to make ends meet, a young single mother paying for college and childcare gets introduced to the fast moneymaking world of stripping.

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: 31%

Audience score: 85%

What critics said: Rich with colorful dialogue and characters, its sometimes ungainly but never boring, and theres a core of truth in its portrait of exotic dancers. Chicago Sun-Times

Netflix description: Using special powers from a magical mask, a young WWE fan causes chaos when he enters a wrestling competition and fights an intimidating rival.

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: 25%

Audience score: 34%

What critics said: The Main Event is harmless, sure, but its also completely disposable. By the final 3-count, it has already disappeared. Detroit News

Netflix description: An inept Detroit cop must team up with his girlfriends foul-mouthed young son when their first crack at bonding time uncovers a criminal conspiracy.

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: 19%

Audience score: 32%

What critics said: A profoundly irritating, cacophonous mess. Tribune News Service

Netflix description: In a world ravaged by the Fire nations aggression toward the peaceful Air, Water and Earth nations, a young boy holds the key to restoring peace.

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: 5%

Audience score: 30%

What critics said: One is bored and stupefied by what seems like an eternity of vacuous spectacle, cod-Buddhist tosh and clunking dialogue. Time Out

Netflix description: While acclimating to campus life, college freshman Sara begins to realize that her new roommate, Rebecca, is becoming obsessed with her.

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: 4%

Audience score: 27%

What critics said: There are some interestingly nasty moments and some chills, but its predictable and derivative. Guardian

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12 movies on Netflix that critics think are terrible but audiences cant get enough of - Business Insider

Human Behavior

2020 was supposed to be the ‘super year for nature.’ What now? – Conservation International

A pandemic has slowed the pace of life. It has not, however, slowed climate breakdown.

Before COVID-19 appeared on anyones radar, world leaders and climate activists declared 2020 a super year for nature", with several global climate conferences set to chart a course for slowing climate breakdown and protecting biodiversity over the next decade.

But most of these conferences have been pushed to 2021, leaving observers wondering: What does a super year for nature look like during a pandemic?

On Earth Day, Conservation International climate experts offer the steps that countries and individuals must take to ensure that postponing climate conferences wont mean postponing action and give reasons for hope amid a time of crisis.

1. Listen to the science

From practicing safe social distancing techniques to developing proper medical treatments, one of the most crucial ways that countries can help curb the spread of COVID-19 is to follow guidelines backed by research, public health experts agree.

The same is true of the climate crisis, said Shyla Raghav, the vice president of climate change Strategy at Conservation International.

We have the science that tells us exactly how we can confront climate change as a global community and we must listen to it.

To help governments determine where to focus their efforts to slow climate change, recent research by Conservation International scientists revealed how much carbon is stored in various ecosystems across the globe and which areas of nature we can least afford to lose.

The scientists identified pockets of irrecoverable carbon vast stores of carbon that are potentially vulnerable to release from human activity and, if lost, could not be restored by 2050. (Why 2050? Its the year by which humans need to reach net-zero emissions to avoid the worst impacts of climate change).

Irrecoverable carbon spans six of the seven continents, including vast stores in the Amazon, the Congo Basin, Indonesia, northwestern North America, southern Chile, southeastern Australia and New Zealand. These ecosystems contain more than 260 billion tons of irrecoverable carbon, most of which is stored in mangroves, peatlands, old-growth forests and marshes. This amount of carbon is equivalent to 26 years of fossil fuel emissions at current rates.

We are talking about a generations worth of carbon contained in these critical ecosystems, explained Allie Goldstein, a climate scientist at Conservation International and the papers lead author, in a recent interview. The good news is that we now know where this irrecoverable carbon can be found and it is largely within our control to protect it.

And countries dont need to wait for global negotiations to protect these places, according to Raghav.

There is a suite of conservation tools that governments can use to protect this carbon, from establishing or expanding protected areas and national parks, to providing financial incentives for sustainable agriculture, to supporting community conservancies and indigenous peoples' rights over the land they steward.

Not only could conserving these places help avoid climate catastrophe, research shows that protecting nature could also help prevent future pandemics by limiting humanitys exposure to wild animals and the diseases they may carry.

When human activities such as logging and mining disrupt and degrade these ecosystems, animals are forced closer together and are more likely to be stressed or sick, as well as more likely to come into contact with people, said Lee Hannah, an ecologist and senior climate change scientist at Conservation International, in a recent interview.

Fundamentally, we need to reimagine our relationship with nature.

2. Engage local communities and make sure everyones voice is heard

While global climate conferences are put on hold, country governments have an opportunity to build new connections with cities and communities and to look locally for climate action, explained Shyla Raghav, Conservation Internationals vice president of climate change strategy.

Countries and communities have long been divided on how to address climate change. Slowing down has given us a chance to strengthen connections between local communities and governments and start making changes right now.

As individuals self-isolate to curb the spread of COVID-19, many governments are already using technology such as webinars and virtual meetings to continue climate negotiations at both a local and national level. Climate activists are also moving their efforts online and using social media campaigns directed at government offices to push for climate action.

But not every community has equal access to technology, added Maggie Comstock, Conservation Internationals senior director of climate policy.

Technology has the power to connect people worldwide but it is difficult to match the pace of progress achieved through in-person negotiations, Comstock said. Governments must make an extra effort to engage those that might not have access to a full suite of technology, such as indigenous peoples. All voices are important in the fight to stop climate change, and we cant leave any countries or individuals behind.

For indigenous peoples and vulnerable communities worldwide, the impact of COVID-19 is exacerbating existing challenges such as food insecurity and limited access to information, explained Kristen Walker Paneimilla, senior vice president of Conservation Internationals Center for Communities and Conservation.

In the face of the coronavirus pandemic, countries and organizations must support indigenous and local communities both financially and by recognizing indigenous rights.

3. Take a breath but dont take your foot off the pedal

There is at least one bright side to the postponement of these global climate conferences, according to Raghav.

The brief hiatus gives us time to prepare even more for success when the conferences occur in 2021 and to advocate for more ambitious targets and commitments for countries and sectors to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

While this hiatus offers an opportunity for countries to prepare, Comstock emphasized that world leaders must continue to act on climate policy where they still can.

2020 can still be a year of ambition we cant take our foot off the pedal. Even though most global climate negotiations are postponed, now is the time to accelerate climate action at a national level, said Comstock.

This year, countries are encouraged to update their country-level commitments under the Paris Agreement how each country is supporting efforts to limit global temperature rise to well below 2 degrees Celsius. Countries must find ways to make their emissions reductions goals a reality and increase the ambition, conferences or no conferences.

4. Learn from the worlds response to the COVID-19 pandemic

Experts agree that countries must take similarly rapid and decisive actions to end the climate crisis which could kill approximately as many people as the number of individuals who die of cancer and infectious diseases today if global warming is not limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), research shows.

The silver lining: The worlds response to COVID-19 shows that it is possible for humanity to take action at the scale necessary to stop climate change, Raghav said.

Crises like this pandemic demonstrate the incredible capacity of societies to come together in the face of unprecedented, insurmountable challenges and adapt, she said. This is exactly what we need to tackle climate change.

Additionally, the recent decline in global emissions illustrates that changes in human behavior can show tangible results for climate action even at an individual level.

In the same way that the world is cooperating to slow this pandemic, it is going to take just as much urgency and participation from governments and individuals to slow the rise in global temperature, Comstock said.

If there is one positive thing that people can learn from this pandemic, it is that every single person has a role to play to end global crises.

Kiley Price is a staff writer at Conservation International. Want to read more stories like this? Sign up for email updateshere.Donate to Conservation Internationalhere.

Cover image: The Atlantic Forest in the Brazilian Amazon ( FG Trade)

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2020 was supposed to be the 'super year for nature.' What now? - Conservation International

Human Behavior

Names in the news – Jacksonville Journal Courier

Journal-Courier staff, dbauer@myjournalcourier.com

Kenneth Babyface Edmonds

Kenneth Babyface Edmonds

Kenneth Babyface Edmonds

Kenneth Babyface Edmonds

Babyface-Riley

battle fades out

The much-hyped battle between Kenny Babyface Edmonds and Teddy Riley was derailed by audio issues, forcing the R&B producers to postpone the Instagram Live event.

More than 400,000 tuned in to watch the livestream with Riley and Edmonds. But sound and technical issues plagued the friendly competition. Riley appeared to prepare more for a concert, with a set-up that led to echoing and playback.

The battle had already been postponed from April 12 after Edmonds was diagnosed with COVID-19. The Grammy-winning singer and producer, said last week he and his family who also tested positive were recovering.

After about an hour of troubleshooting Saturday, the 61-year-old singer said they would try again another time.

I think that its only right that we postpone this thing until another time when there arent any technical difficulties, and everybody can hear the music the way it needs to be heard, said Edmonds.

The technical struggles of two legendary producers with a stripped-down Instagram performance spawned widespread mockery and disappointment on social media, including from other quarantined musicians who had tuned in.

Come on its 2020 we aint meant to get what we want, Adele commented.

The digital battle was part of a series dubbed Verzuz organized by Swizz Beatz and Timbaland.

Goodall sees

closings good

Even though the planet has reaped the benefits of a cleaner environment from society shutting down during the coronavirus outbreak, Jane Goodall worries about human behavior resorting back to a business as usual mindset after the pandemic is over.

The famed primatologist wants people to grow wiser and live an enjoyable life without harming the environment and animals that live within it.

We have to learn how to deal with less, said Goodall, who began her lauded career as a pioneering researcher of chimpanzees in Africa more than 50 years ago. Shes worked for decades on conservation, animal welfare and environmental issues.

Goodall has encouraged young people since 1991 to become stewards in their communities through her Roots & Shoots program, which operates in 60 countries. She normally travels 300 days per year to advocate her endeavors, but these days shes been staying busy inside her family home in Bournemouth, England, to practice social distancing. She calls it more exhausting than traveling.

Her new documentary Jane Goodall: The Hope, premieres today on National Geographic and Nat Geo WILD, while streamed on Disney Plus and Hulu. The two-hour documentary focuses on her lauded career of transforming the scope of environmentalism.

Associated Press

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Names in the news - Jacksonville Journal Courier

Human Behavior

How the Use of Tape Helps Visualize Social Distancing Around the World – My Modern Met

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A post shared by Observing Safe Distancing (@tape_measures) on Apr 9, 2020 at 1:03am PDT

Since the coronavirus has forced us to rethink how close we are to each other, businessesand entire citieshave had to get creative about how they impose the six feet apart guideline. A humble roll of tape has proven an effective way to promote these practices, and the Instagram account @tape_measures chronicles how this looks around Singapore. Often, the solutions are simple. By just adhering X on a park bench seat, you know that youve got to find somewhere else to sit.

The use of tape demonstrates its power to curb human behavior as well as its versatility. The most common way in which the material is employed is to deter people from sitting or standing in certain places. But, its also an effective tool for way-finding. There are many instances in which taped arrows and simple hash marks demonstrate how someone needs to proceed in stores and lobbies where maintaining proper physical distancing would be an issue.

Perhaps the most striking thing about @tape_measures is the unintended beauty that it documents. In some of the images, the geometric design elementsmade using tapeadds an unexpected pop of color to an otherwise ordinary place.

Scroll down for some of our favorite rule-abiding designs by @tape_measures and then follow the account for more. You can even submit how you see tape used around where you live, too.

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Human Behavior

The tricky thing about predicting coronavirus and climate change: Human behavior – Grist

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Just a few weeks ago, researchers at Imperial College London released a model of the coronavirus pandemic that shocked policymakers into action. It predicted a staggering 2.2 million deaths from COVID-19 in the U.S., and up to 510,000 in the U.K. causing both countries to abruptly change course on containing the outbreak.

U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who had said that he wanted to allow the virus to spread through the country to build herd immunity, instituted a nationwide stay-at-home order. President Trump also changed direction, switching from calling it a hoax one week to saying every one of us has a critical role to play in slowing the disease.

But 10 days after the reports release, the epidemiologist who led the modeling effort, Neil Ferguson, appeared before the U.K. parliament, arguing that he now expected the countrys fatalities to be less than 20,000. (He didnt touch on projections for the U.S.) Some saw this as a troubling reversal. The conservative media outlet the Federalist announced that Ferguson had retracted the findings of his doomsday pandemic model.

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Models are simplified representations of reality and an often-maligned tool of modern science. Those that estimate how much greenhouse gases will heat up the planet have been attacked for years by deniers who argue that they have little connection to the real world. In the face of a global pandemic, when lives and jobs are on the line, epidemiologists are suddenly facing the same criticism. (Senator John Cornyn from Texas complained on Twitter that modeling of both the current pandemic and climate change isnt the scientific method, folks.)

Built using statistics and mathematics, scientific models can present possible futures how a disease might spread, for example, or how rising CO2 levels will change our climate. But they cant account for all aspects of reality, and will always come with uncertainty. They are tools, not crystal balls.

So those who criticized the Imperial College model for wrongly predicting millions of deaths in the U.S. and U.K. were off-base. Ferguson and his colleagues had predicted that over half a million Britons would die without mitigation measures and that approximately 250,000 would die with the measures the government was implementing. With optimal social-distancing measures, which the U.K. put into place shortly after the report was released, the researchers expected deaths in the tens of thousands. (The Imperial College group did not model U.S. deaths with strict social-distancing measures.)

So the model didnt change; the policies did. Meanwhile, the U.S. government has been relying on a model by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. That model initially projected between 100,000 and 240,000 deaths from the coronavirus now, that estimate has been revised down to between 30,000 and 170,000. Thats because it incorporated new social distancing data from Spain and Italy, suggesting that lockdown measures could be more effective at slowing the spread in the United States than previously believed.

I think in this pandemic its particularly difficult because were making assumptions in these models about human behaviors which are incredibly difficult to capture in a model and put a single number to, said Helen Jenkins, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Boston University. Most epidemiological models simulate the number of people who are susceptible, infected, and have recovered: a so-called S-I-R model. But that requires making estimates for how often people interact and how much social distancing they are doing a difficult job in a country of 300 million people and 50 states pursuing slightly different lockdown strategies.

Researchers face similar hurdles when predicting climate change. On the one hand, they use easier-to-model processes like convection, heat and fluid transfer. But at some point they also have to incorporate human and group behavior, at least if they want to predict how greenhouse gas emissions might change in the future.

You could have the very best physical model in the world, but if you get future human behavior wrong, youd end up with a pretty bad future projection, said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute. The uncertainties in climate change to our choices as individuals and as societies matter just as much if not more than the uncertainties in the physical climate system that were trying to model.

What makes the job even trickier is that once a projection is made public, the model itself can lead people to change their behaviors. If it projects millions of deaths from a pandemic, governments might tighten travel restrictions and people might decide to stay indoors. Zeynep Tufekci, associate professor at the University of North Carolina, wrote in the Atlantic that this is part of what models are supposed to do. They present a range, or a tree of possibilities, some of which are so disastrous that immediate action should be taken to prevent them. By changing behavior, she argues, we can prune those catastrophic branches and direct governments towards a safer future.

Hausfather and other scientists argue that we have already trimmed one potentially catastrophic branch when it comes to climate change. Back in the mid-2000s, it seemed possible that business-as-usual carbon emissions could lead to 5 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100. China was in a rush to open coal plants, and it looked like coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels, was on track to dominate for another century. Today, a business-as-usual approach would likely lead to around 3 degrees Celsius of warming in part because world governments have begun cracking down on coal and boosting renewable energy.

Even though its nowhere near the level of action that would be required to meet Paris commitments, its still enough to start bending the curve away from these worst-case outcomes, Hausfather said.

Thats part of why Anthony Fauci, a key member of the White Houses coronavirus task force, has repeatedly said that appropriate action in hindsight will look like an overreaction. If it looks like youre overreacting, youre probably doing the right thing, he told Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation. Success can wind up looking like a failure.

What does that mean for addressing the pandemic? Social distancing appears to have helped the U.S. avoid the worst-case scenarios, but other questions remain. Researchers are now trying to understand which measures have been most effective (Closing schools? Limiting social gatherings?), so that some restrictions can be slowly lifted. But not every option can easily fit into epidemiological models. Public health officials and governors still have to use their own judgement, balancing health risks with other social and economic needs.

The German sociologist Ulrich Beck once wrote that expected risks are the whip to keep the present in line. Models are intended to do just that, to keep things from going off the rails. They cant provide certainty but for both climate change and coronavirus, they can help us avoid the worst.

The way that humanity tackles this pandemic parallels how it might fight climate change. Sign up for our semi-weekly newsletter,Climate in the Time of Coronavirus.

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Human Behavior

Different Types of Stress and Their Associated Cost – The Great Courses Daily News

By Mark Leary, Ph.D., Duke UniversityA stress and performance curve shows the different levels of acute and chronic stress and their impact on our performance. (Image: Arka38 /Shutterstock)

Most of the people we know are stressed out. Many of them are busy with work, or school, or family, or other activities. Not only do they have too much to do, but they also have to deal with all kinds of frustrating and stressful events, including problems at work, deadlines at school, and conflicts at home.

Some people are stressed out by their financial situation or legal problems, while some are dealing with the problems of people they care about, such as aging parents, children who are struggling, and friends or family members battling alcohol or drugs, among others.

There are also people whose everyday lives are just inherently stressful, such as police officers and members of the armed forces. And, of course, everybody occasionally experiences traumatic life events, such as the death of a loved one, or losing ones job, or having ones primary relationship fall apart.

This is a transcript from the video series Understanding the Mysteries of Human Behavior. Watch it now, on The Great Courses Plus.

One research study found that 75 percent of Americans say they experience extreme stress at least one day a week, on average. Another study that had people keep a daily record of stressful events found that respondents experienced at least one stressful event on 40 percent of the days, during the length of the study, and multiple stressful events on 10 percent of the days. Thats a lot of stress.

As you have probably experienced personally, stress takes a major toll on both psychological and physical well-being. Its hard for people to enjoy life when their stress levels are high. People who are under stress are often moody and hostile, and chronic stress leads some people to become depressed.

Stress interferes with peoples ability to perform well at work and at school. They are often juggling so many things that they cant do a good job on anything, and they are so preoccupied by whatever is causing their stress that they cant focus on the things they need to do. As stress mounts, people feel unable to handle even everyday tasks, so they often begin to avoid challenging situations. Studies show that about half the time that people stay home from work or from school, is not because they are sick, but because they feel too stressed out to deal with work or class.

And, of course, stress takes a tremendous toll on peoples health: high blood pressure, infections, and illnesses; weight gain, digestive problems, insomnia, skin conditions, and asthma are just a few of the health problems that can be caused by stress.

The financial costs of stress are also very high. Its beenestimated that stress costs American businesses $300 billion a year in missedwork, employee turnover, reduced productivity, and health-care costs.

Stress is such a serious and common problem that its not an understatement to suggest that we have a stress epidemic. But have you ever wondered where all this stress comes from, and why we dont deal with stress better than we do? Its almost as if human beings were designed with some sort of flaw that prevents them from coping with the stresses they experience in life.

Learn more about solving psychological mysteries.

To understand the causes of stress, we need to make a distinction between acute and chronic stress. Acute stress occurs when people experience an immediate threat to their well-being. Something happens that needs an immediate response from our side. Acute stress is a normal part of life for all animals, including human beings.

In fact, animals in the wild experience brief, acute stressors intermittently all day long. Theyre sitting in a tree, or grazing in a field, or swimming in a river, when suddenly a possible threat arisesa threatening animal, a loud noiseand their body spring into action to deal with the threat. Their heart rate and blood pressure increase, and their muscles become tense to prepare them to take action.

The same with people: you nearly have an accident while driving your car, or you think someone is following you while walking down a dark street, or you get a piece of bad news, or you lose your wallet. When these kinds of events happen, the stress response kicks in as natures way of helping you respond to the event. But, then, once the event is over, your body returns to normal and acute stress goes away, with little or no lingering effects.

Learn more about how human nature evolve.

Chronic stress is another matter altogether. When people talk about being under stress, theyre usually talking about chronic stress; stress thats almost always there. Even when the person is doing something else, its in the background ready to rise up at any time.

Most animals dont appear to experience chronic stress. Have you ever seen a chronically stressed-out animal in the wild? We have no evidence that between those occasional episodes of acute stress that occur throughout an animals day, animals are chronically worried, uptight, and stressed out.

A deer may be startled by a loud noise and take off through the forest, but as soon as the threat is gone, the deer immediately calms down and starts grazing. It doesnt appear to be tied in knots the way that many of us are. Throw a rock in the water and the fish scatter in a flurry of acute stress, but then they quickly return to normal.

The only animals that seem to show signs of chronic stress are some that live around human beings. Animals that are kept in cages or abused by people certainly show signs of chronic stress, but when left to their own devices, far away from people, animals dont appear to experience chronic stress the way that people do.

Both acute stress and chronic stress have an impact on us humans, but the negative impact of chronic stress is far greater. Every individual needs to be aware of it and needs to adopt measures to counter stress. American businesses need to equally cognizant of the impact stress has on their employees. Even if they think purely from a profit perspective, it makes sense to lower stress to reduce losses. Stress is a major problem that we all must address in order to make the best use of our bodies and time.

Some emotional signs of stress include depression or anxiety; anger, irritability or restlessness; feeling unmotivated or unfocused; trouble sleeping or sleeping too much; racing thoughts or constant worry; and problems with memory or concentration.

According to the American Psychological Association (APA), the three different types of stress are acutestress, episodic acutestress, and chronicstress.

Stress or chronic stress does a lot of harm to our bodies. Over a periodoftime,it cancontribute to long-term problems of heart and blood vessels.

To relieve chronic stress, we should educate ourselves regarding the complications, set limits to our goals, get better sleep, try belly breathing, and get professional help.

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Different Types of Stress and Their Associated Cost - The Great Courses Daily News

Human Behavior

What can the Black Plague teach us about America’s reaction to the COVID-19 crisis? – LGBTQ Nation

As we navigate scary and uncertain times, its important to look to history as a guide. During my quarantine, I re-read A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. Its a book by Barbara Tuchman and Chapter 5 discusses how people reacted during the ominous Black Plague. It offers lessons we can apply to todays COVID-19 pandemic.

Ironically, the book actually cheered me up.

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If you think things are bleak today, remember that the Black Plague wiped out nearly one in three people in Europe and the Middle East between 1347 and 1351. This translates into more than 20 million corpses.

At the time it was widely thought God had given up on humanity to punish them for sin. Much of the population thought it might be the end of the world. So, as bad as things are and as frustrating as they may be, its important to count our blessings and realize that it could be significantly worse.

In October 1347, trading ships arrived from the Black Sea and pulled into the harbor of Messina, Sicily. The sailors on those doomed ships were sick and quickly dying with a horrific new disease. With its trademark black boils and rapid death the illness quickly spread like wildfire across Europe.

Of course, we are a much more advanced civilization today, but some things havent changed. Chiefly human nature which means there are direct parallels between then and now that we can learn from.

When people are frightened, they seek answers. Unfortunately, a significant subset also seeks out scapegoats. In Medieval Europe, Jews were falsely blamed for creating the Black Plague by poisoning the wells.

In Savoy in 1348, Jews were rounded up, put on trial and tortured until they confessed to poisoning the wells with packets of poison pills that they allegedly kept in a narrow stitched leather bag. These coerced confessions were distributed by a letter from town to town and formed the basis for mass retribution. A brutal and deadly wave of false allegations and savage attacks ensued.

The first assaults occurred in the Spring of 1348 in the French towns of Narbonne and Carcassonne. Jews were dragged out of their homes and thrown into bonfires.

In Freiburg, Augsburg, Nurnberg, Munich, Koenigsberg, Regensburg and other city centers, Jews were slaughtered by mobs with a thoroughness that seemed to seek a final solution.

Today, in 2020, there is no shortage of ignorant people and demagogues looking to point fingers, stir up trouble, assign blame and inflame tensions. They are opportunistically attempting to exploit the COVID-19 crisis to provoke hated against groups they dislike.

Shamefully, this effort has been led, in part, by President Donald Trump.

Trump is doing this, in spite of the fact we now know that Asian Americans have been targeted, attacked and victimized. While they arent being burned alive, like Jews during the Black Plague, they have been harassed, spit on and assaulted. Asian Americans now have targets on their backs.

There are those trying to blame LGBT people for the spread of the coronavirus. Obviously, this is irrational, but our opponents are looking to foment hate and provoke a violent backlash.

Homophobes are deliberately spreading a conspiracy theory that gay people caused coronavirus by partying too much in Italy, by using an old video from a carnival in Brazil. Unfortunately, the fake video has gone viral. No pun intended.

Televangelist Pat Robertson blamed the coronavirus on same-sex marriage.The Rev. Ralph Drollinger, Trumps Cabinet Bible teacher, said that LGBT people caused Gods wrath in a blog post on COVID-19.

This obnoxious behavior should surprise no one. After the terrorist attacks of 9-11, LGBT people were conveniently targeted by well-known televangelists, including Revs. Jerry Falwell and Robertson.

Had this finger-pointing occurred only a couple decades earlier, its likely the consequences would have been far greater. And in other countries, where LGBT rights are less secure, the effects of such reckless rhetoric could still prove deadly today.

In fact, a Ukrainian LGBT organization pushed back against such bigotry by suing Orthodox Patriarch Filaret over comments blaming the spread of the coronavirus on same-sex marriage. The gay rights activists said that his backward comments risked fueling hatred and discrimination.

And, most predictably, the Jews are still being scapegoated today. Rick Wiles, a Florida pastor and the founder of the far-right website TruNews, said on March 26 that God is giving the Jews the coronavirus because they oppose his son Jesus.

There is also a wild, online conspiracy theory that 5G wireless technology is responsible for spreading COVID-19. As a result, people are burning down cell towers. Whether its the 14th Century or the 21st Century, irrational human behavior is quite predictable.

Some religious fanatics will brazenly disobey social distancing rules, with little regard for the people they harm. They are selfish and dont care about anybody but themselves. They wantonly infect people, and if those individuals get sick or die they chalk it up to Gods will.

In 1349, a group of roaming Christian religious zealots called the flagellants erupted in a sudden frenzy, Tuchman wrote. Members of this cult would literally whip their own bodies in penance until they bled. They roamed in large bands that sped across Europe with the same fiery contagion as the plague, merrily slaughtering Jews at every stop along the way.

These extremists had very strict rules. They were forbidden to bathe or shave, change their clothes, sleep in beds, talk, or have intercourse with women without the group Masters permission. Unsurprisingly, similar to todays moralizing hypocrites, the flagellants were later charged with having orgies in which whipping was combined with sex.

According to Tuchmans book:

Organized groups of 200 to 1,000 flagellants stripped to the waist beat themselves with leather whips tipped with iron spikes until they bled. While they cried aloud to Christ and the Virgin for pity, and called upon God to spare us, the watching townspeople sobbed and groaned in sympathy. These bands put on regular performances in towns including church squares. The inhabitants greeted them with reverence and ringing of church bells, lodged them in their houses, and brought children to be healedthey dipped clothes in blood, which they pressed against their eyes and preserved as relics.

As you can well imagine, this caused an explosion of new cases of Black Plague, leading to even more sickness, death, and despair. This was done at a time when they actually did know about social distancing. They didnt know the science behind the theory or about the bacteria that caused the plague, but they did have an understanding that it was spread from close human contact. So, even in the 14th Century, what the flagellants did was grossly reckless and irresponsible.

Which brings us to the year 2020, where we have the same self-absorbed religious zealots who have apparently learned nothing from history. Mired in ignorance and superstition, they flout the law, flock to megachurches, and foolishly believe that God will protect them. Some of those arrogant and thoughtless people will get sick and they will die. They will also infect other innocent people who dont share their beliefs.

One pastor who learned the hard way was Bishop Gerald Glenn of New Deliverance Evangelistic Church in Richmond, VA. During his infamous in-person service, the Bishop said he firmly believed God was larger than the virus and said he was proud of being controversial for violating safety protocols. The Bishop also claimed he was an essential worker, saying hes a preacher and he talks to God.

Proving God has a sense of humor, the good pastor died from the coronavirus on Easter Sunday.

A third similarity with the 14th Century are efforts by unethical charlatans to promote quack cures. Some of these magic elixirs to treat the Black Plague included: drawing out the infection by making the infected person bleed, purging it with laxatives or enemas, lancing the black boils, application of hot plasters, pills of powdered stags horn, compounds of rare spices, and emeralds.

There was also a bizarre belief that latrine attendants were immune to the Black Plague, so many people visited the public latrines on the theory that the odors were efficacious.

Of course, this was at a time when people thought washing the scalp with a boys urine cured ringworm, and gout was treated with goat dung, mixed with rosemary and honey. Talk about the cure being worse than the curse!

The final similarity between then and now is the role social and financial inequality plays in spreading diseases.

The rich fled to their country places with wells of cool water and vaults of rare wines. The urban poor died in their burrows, and only the stench of their bodies informed neighbors of their death. That the poor were more heavily afflicted than the rich was clearly remarked at the time in the north and the south. A Scottish chronicler, John of Fordun, stated flatly that the pest attacked especially the meaner sort and common peopleseldom the magnates.

Sound familiar? Unfortunately, then and now, different incomes often lead to different health outcomes. I guess they didnt have universal healthcare back then either.

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What can the Black Plague teach us about America's reaction to the COVID-19 crisis? - LGBTQ Nation

Human Behavior

Counties Where Hannity Viewers Outnumber Tucker Carlsons Have Had More COVID-19 Deaths, Study Finds – Yahoo Entertainment

Counties where viewers of Fox News Hannity outnumbered Tucker Carlson Tonight were associated with a higher number of COVID-19 deaths in the early stages of the pandemic, according to a new study from the University of Chicagos Becker Friedman Institute for Economics.

Although the two most-watched cable shows air on the same network, the studys authors analyzed transcripts from each and concluded that Carlson warned viewers about the threat posed by the coronavirus from early February, while Hannity originally dismissed the risks associated with the virus before gradually adjusting his position starting late February.

The studys authors Leonardo Bursztyn, Aakaash Rao, Christopher Roth and David Yanagizawa-Drott wrote in the working paper that they were interested in studying the effects of the two most-watched cable news shows in the U.S. to monitor for an effect on viewer behavior and health outcomes.

The researchers surveyed 1,045 Fox News viewers aged 55 and older in April on their changes in behavior such as with more hand washing, canceling travel plans and social distancing in response to the virus. The study found that Hannitys viewers changed their behaviors five days later than other Fox News viewers, while Carlsons viewers changed their behaviors three days earlier than other Fox News viewers.

Also Read: Hannity Accuses NY Times of Libel for Linking His Show to Man's Coronavirus Death

The studys authors then looked at county-by-county viewership of the shows and confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Accounting for a number of unobservable dimensions that could independently affect the spread of the virus, the studys authors found that an increase in exposure to Hannity in comparison to Tucker Carlson Tonight was associated with roughly 30% more COVID-19 cases on March 14 and 21% more COVID-19 deaths on March 28. But the effects of the shows on COVID-19 cases began to decline by mid-March, the researchers found, after they detected a shift in tone on Hannitys show transcripts beginning in late February.

In response to the study, a spokesperson for Fox News said that the clips from Hannitys coverage were cherry-picked and that the study was reckless and irresponsible.

As this timeline proves, Hannity has covered COVID-19 since the early days of the story. The study almost completely ignores his coverage and repeated, specific warnings and concerns from January 27-February 26 including an early interview with Dr. Fauci in January, the spokesperson told TheWrap in a statement. This is a reckless disregard for the truth.

Also Read: 74 Journalism Professors Sign Letter Calling Fox News' Coronavirus Coverage a 'Danger to Public Health'

Hannity also defended his comments about the virus in an interview with Newsweek earlier this month a day after 74 journalism professors and journalists wrote an open letter to him, criticizing his coverage as being a danger to public health. The Fox News host alsopointed to his January 27 conversation with Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the White House coronavirus task force, who told the Fox News host that America was prepared to handle the virus and that there was a low risk at the time, but with the possibility that it could get much worse.

Also Read: Roger Stone Tells Tucker Carlson His 40-Month Prison Judgment Is a 'Death Sentence' Amid Pandemic

In March, Hannity also faced pushback after using the word hoax in relation to the coronavirus a phrase he claims he was using in reference to how Democrats were using the pandemic to supposedly bludgeon Trump.

Theyre scaring the living hell out of people and I see it again like, Oh, lets bludgeon Trump with this new hoax,' Hannity said on a March 9 episode of his show.

The University of Chicago studys authors acknowledged that their findings could not speak to the longer-term effects of exposure to the two shows, which might include additional health and information spillovers, nor does it speak to the overall effect on the total cases and death toll associated with the coronavirus in the U.S., but that it did add to the ongoing conversation about how media coverage can impact human behavior.

We provide evidence that greater exposure to Hannity relative to Tucker Carlson Tonight increased cases and deaths throughout March and early April. However, it is possible that these effects will fade and even possibly flip over time, the study said. While our findings cannot yet speak to long-term effects, they indicate that provision of misinformation in the early stages of a pandemic can have important consequences for how a disease ultimately affects the population.

Read original story Counties Where Hannity Viewers Outnumber Tucker Carlsons Have Had More COVID-19 Deaths, Study Finds At TheWrap

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