Category Archives: Human Behavior

Human Behavior

The influence of risk perceptions on close contact frequency during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic | Scientific Reports – Nature.com

In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic that has led to unprecedented negative health outcomes and social economic burden2,3, it is important to understand factors that influence individual behaviour. Our study explored the relationship between 5 specific perception variables related to COVID-19 and behavioral response in terms of the reported number of social contacts. We used a generalized linear mixed effects model in order to take into account both the within-participant and between participant variability from the two longitudinal datasets.

The results indicated that individuals who perceived themselves to experience severe illness if they contract a COVID-19 infection tended to make significantly fewer contacts as compared to those who had low or neutral perceptions. The observed relationship between the perceived severity and social contact behaviour was consistent in both analyses (i.e, analyses involving survey data from the first 8 waves of data collection, and also from the subsequent 11 waves). It is important to note that these two longitudinal surveys queried respondents behavior in two different COVID-19 pandemic waves in Belgium, with the first survey coinciding with the first COVID-19 wave, and the second survey with the second wave. Hence the similarity between the observed patterns of associations is suggestive of the crucial role perceived severity has on social contact behaviour. Our findings were echoed greatly by results from a study utilizing CoMix data from the United Kingdom (UK)32. This study found that individuals aged between 18 and 59 years who perceived high levels of seriousness if infected by the SARS-CoV-2 virus had lower mean number of contacts than those who perceived low levels of seriousness.

Several studies examined the role of risk perceptions on adoption of recommended preventive measures during the COVID-19 pandemic7,12,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22. These studies have found that perceived severity was associated with the adoption of the protective behaviours, in line with the Health Belief Model. More specifically, people with higher perceived severity of the disease were found to be more likely to adopt the recommended precautionary measures. However, it is important to mention that the response variable of interest differed between studies. Whilst the response variable in our study was the number of social contacts, other studies considered indicators of avoidance of behaviour or adoption of the recommended measures as their outcome. Nonetheless, the results all point towards the critical role of perceived severity on individuals response behaviour. Furthermore, the differences in the number of contacts for individuals with high perceived severity versus individuals with low or neutral levels of severity was around one contact in our study. The evaluation of the implications of such differences on the transmission dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 are a topic for future research. In addition, with respect to other response variables, the number of contacts can more easily and more consistently be included in mathematical models of infectious diseases33, making the analysis presented in this work crucial for future modelling endeavours of COVID-19.

In our study, the relationship between perceived susceptibility and the number of social contacts did not yield consistent relationships. These ambiguities may have resulted from a variety of factors including, but not limited to: firstly, there could be the presence of optimism bias, a phenomenon where individuals tend to underestimate their likelihood of experiencing a negative event or overestimate the likelihood of positive events34. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, this refers to individuals underestimating their perceived risk of getting infected. Several studies have indicated the presence of optimism bias during the COVID-19 pandemic12,14,35. Secondly, individuals having a higher number of social contacts might perceive themselves more likely to get infected as a result of their behaviour and vice-versa. Results from the aforementioned study in UK32 found that in general, participants who indicated to be likely to get infected by the SARS-CoV-2 virus had higher mean number of contacts than those who indicated to be unlikely to get the virus. And thirdly, this could be due to individuals perception on their inherent vulnerability to infection. Thus based on our results, the relationship between perceived susceptibility and social contact behaviour remains inconclusive and thus warrants more research.

Similarly, the relationship between perceived benefit to vulnerable and number of social contacts yielded inconsistent results. There were no significant differences in social contact behaviour between individuals who had high, neutral or low perceptions in terms of protecting the vulnerable individuals in the population. This could be due to either participants responding to the questionnaire item based on the frequency of contacts with vulnerable individuals within their close social circle or occupation (i.e, health care workers in elderly homes). In addition, it might be that participants who are vulnerable (mainly elderly people with underlying comorbidities) perceive no major benefit to other vulnerable individuals as they generally make fewer social contacts. As such, more research is required in this perspective as deliberate efforts in the realm of public health messaging and communication has emphasized on adhering to recommended measures to protect others36.

Perceived effectiveness of measures and perceived adherence to measures were both inversely associated with the number of contacts. Participants with high levels of perceived effectiveness of measures made lower number of contacts than those with low levels. Similarly, participants with high levels of perceived adherence to measures made fewer contacts than those low levels. However, the observed differences were generally small. According to the theory of Protection Motivation and Self-efficacy, persons belief in effectiveness of an intervention measure, and their confidence to adhere to the measure predicts the likelihood of engaging in the preventive behaviour24. Previous studies conducted under this theoretical frameworkthat explore the relationships between perceived effectiveness of measures and perceived adherence to measures with the recommended health behaviourdo not explicitly use the number of social contacts as a proxy of the recommended health behaviour. Instead, they use indicators of avoidance of behaviours or adoption of recommended measures as above-mentioned. However, our results are consistent with results from previous studies4,5,6,15,25,26,37 despite the outcome variables being slightly different. It is worth mentioning that the number of social contacts is a proxy of contact events responsible for disease transmission and is influenced by underlying determinants such as household size, day of the week (weekday versus weekend), age, among others as indicated in our study as well as in previous studies27,38. Thus, more studies utilizing the number of social contacts as a proxy of the adoption of recommended measures will be pertinent to shed more light on the influence of perceptions on contact behaviour, while controlling for possible confounders. Furthermore, data on perceived effectiveness of measures and perceived adherence to measures was only collected in the first 8 waves (i.e, the first wave of COVID-19 pandemic), and thus continued data collection on these contextual factors could be of great importance to gain additional insights in the observed relationships. It is worth mentioning that both the perceptions and number of social contacts changed over time with slight differences observed by age groups. Furthermore, the wave of data collection which coincided with changing regimes of intervention measures and also changing landscape of the pandemic, was an important factor in the interaction effects of the perception variables, further highlighting that perceptions and social contact behaviour were dynamic in time. This is consistent with results from 2 studies that found evolution of both perceptions and protective behaviours during the influenza A(H1N1)v2009 pandemic9,10, and a recent study from UK conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic22.

Our findings highlight the importance of aligning the publics COVID-19 related perceptions with reality. That is, people who perceive COVID-19 to be more severe, will be more inclined to engage in preventive behaviours (here measured as the number of social contacts). Based on our results, we can suggest that public health communication and targeted messaging could yield more impact if tailored to messages emphasizing the severity of COVID-19. Thus, it is important to stress the severity of COVID-19e.g in terms of excess mortality39 or long-term effects post COVID-19 infection40. Furthermore, we found significant interaction effects between age and both perceived severity and perceived susceptibility, hence age-adjusted campaigns with respect to disease severity and susceptibility are required to enhance social distancing measures. A collaborative multidisciplinary approach by scientists, policymakers and communication experts is pivotal to formulate an effective and contextualized strategy that could optimise the impact of public health messaging41.

Our study has several limitations. The associations between the perception variables and number of social contacts could have been affected by the level of stringency of the intervention measures that were being implemented. For example, during a lockdown, participants may not be able to contact people outside their household, even if they wanted to. However, this effect should be minimal as we controlled for the survey wave of data collection where different intervention measures were put in place. Information on COVID-19 vaccination was only partly available during the second survey. The percentage of the vaccinated individuals ranged from 0.5% in wave 12 to 14.8% in wave 19. Hence, due to the small sample of the vaccinated respondents, the vaccination status was not included in the analyses. However, a descriptive analysis (Supplementary Fig. S13) revealed no apparent differences in risk perceptions in the vaccinated individuals (before and after vaccination), and also in social contact behaviour between the vaccinated and not vaccinated (Supplementary Fig. S14). Although the panel of participants was representative by gender, age and region of residence in each survey wave, the voluntary opt-in of participants in each subsequent survey wave could be subject to self-selection bias where individuals more concerned about the pandemic in general would be more likely to participate. However, the participation rate was relatively high with 67.5% having participated in 3 or more waves in the first 8 survey waves and 63.19% in the subsequent 11 survey waves. Based on their importance in the context of social contact behaviourwe made sure the sampling design ensured representativeness in terms of age, gender and region of residence27,38. However, other potential factors such as race, urban/rural dwelling, income and education were not considered. Future studies of social contact patterns could take the latter factors into account to obtain an even more representative sample and to assess the impact of these factors on social contact patterns. In the process of model building for the different perception variables which entailed numerous hypothesis testing, our models could have missed potential significant interaction effects other than the ones we mainly focused on in our exploratory modeling. The latter were selected due to their epidemiological relevance in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. This could have marginally affected the significance of the terms in the final models in our analyses. While potentially having an impact on respondents risk perception, we did not collect information about their COVID-19 infection history. However, given the study was conducted in the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, where the percentages of the already infected in the population ranged between 0.04% and 0.62% in the first survey, and 4.05% and 7.72% in the second survey, the population-level effect is expected to be minimal. Our study findings could be subject to reverse causality since we assumed that perceptions precede the social contact behaviour, which might not necessarily be true. Our study could also suffer from social desirability bias, despite that anonymity of responses was assured. The results of our study apply to the Belgian population and caution is required when extrapolating these to other populations.

This study assessed the relationship between COVID-19 perceptions and social contact behaviour using two longitudinal surveys from a panel of individuals between April and August 2020, and November 2020 and April 2021 in Belgium. We found that individuals who perceived COVID-19 to be a serious illness for them made a significantly lower number of contacts as compared to those who had low or neutral perceptions. Similarly, individuals with high levels of perceived effectiveness and perceived adherence to measures made fewer contacts as compared to those with low levels. Given the importance of human behaviour in the transmission dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 virus, tailored communication strategies by public health officials about the severity of COVID-19 is crucial.

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The influence of risk perceptions on close contact frequency during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic | Scientific Reports - Nature.com

Human Behavior

DO | The Social Limelight – Cornell University The Cornell Daily Sun

There is a very specific feeling of dread that often overtakes me in uncomfortable social settings. My blood begins to churn and immense pressure builds up in my chest. I cant quite think straight and the usual screening process between emotion and action is infiltrated by panic and an impulse to escape. As much as I might try to behave normally, my mind is scrambling to find some way out of my imagined spotlight.

These episodes are a regular occurrence for me. As you can imagine, it gets exhausting always being front and center on a stage that youve completely fabricated for yourself. Im unable to do much of anything without also considering how the people around me are likely to perceive it. Every twitch in my facial expression, every touch of my hair, every small shift in my intonation has been thoroughly envisioned, assessed and cleared by my inner self-critic. Anything that risks alienating me from the group is a no-go and any grab for attention, no matter how small, must first be assessed through every doomsday scenario imaginable.

My outlook is fueled by two very conflicting feelings. The first is the outside gaze, the judgments that the people around me are surely making at all times. Their assessments of my appearance, my personality and the way I carry myself. No action goes unnoticed and every little insecurity Im zoomed in on must be a blaring siren alerting everyone that I should be avoided at all costs.

Accompanying my adolescent egocentrism is the second reason for my insecurity-driven social complex, which is the fear of being alone. I assume this worry stems somehow from evolutionary adaptations for group survival and the reproductive advantages of attracting a mate by being similar to everyone else. In the 21st century, this amounts to feelings of estrangement like Im a pariah in any social circle I attempt to wedge my way into. My place in the group is justified by happenstance and my presence would never be missed or even noticed if I happened to slip out quietly, as is my tendency when faced with the slightest bit of discomfort.

I feel at once like the center of attention and a forgettable wisp of a personality. In my mind, everyones always participating in the nitpicking and the badmouthing, but never doing anything to challenge those assumptions about me. Its always my job to prove my social worth to get others to talk to me, a task far too exhausting to beat out a solo night of watching Korean rom-coms, accompanied by a bubbling pot of instant ramen.

I could point to multiple origins in my life that could be potentially responsible for my paradoxical unease. When I was a child, I was always extremely aware of how adults were judging my actions whether they were impressed by my shows of maturity or bursting out into amused, but nevertheless hurtful, fits of laughter at the blunders that children make out of simply not knowing enough about socially acceptable human behavior. Anytime I misused a punchline I heard from a TV show or unknowingly violated some unspoken social norm, I made sure to quickly scan how the adults were reacting. Any indication that I was doing something even slightly out of line was motivation for me to just keep it to myself the next time. I never understood that their reactions were merely out of amusement and not a judgment on me.

Another possible source lies in my position in my family. As the eldest son in a small Asian family, I never had to vie much for attention when I was younger. I received praise and affection for the smallest accomplishments and grew up convinced that I deserved to be part of the group just for being me. Attending gifted programs from the 2nd to 12th grade meant that I kept the same circle of friends for most of my childhood, never having to fend for myself in an environment where I didnt already know several people I could fall back on.

College completely disrupted the safety nets I grew up cherishing so much. Gone are the doting family members who hang onto my every word and the friends who dont need some compelling reason to give me their time of day. I have no anchor to rely on, no reason to believe that I will be welcomed into the crowd with open arms.

All I want is some sense of security. The ability to interact with others without the expectation to prove that Im a friend-worthy person. I dont want to feel like I have to nitpick every last thing I do because I dont trust that the people around me arent internally badmouthing me.

Too often do I live in service of my imagined sense of others perceptions. I become convinced that negating any potentially embarrassing parts of my personality is the easiest way to get others to like me, when the truth is usually the complete opposite. My constant search for signs of alienation or disinterest in the people I interact with exhausts the little decision-making chimp in my brain to the point where avoiding the interaction altogether is the most attractive choice.

The magnifying glass that I feel constantly pointed at me, no matter how self-imposed it may be, restrains all the most distinctive elements of my personality. Behind the wall of insecurities and timid small talk is, in my opinion, a perceptive, curious, open-minded and incredibly humble individual. The only one preventing him from emerging more frequently is almost always me.

Noah Do is a sophomore in the College of Human Ecology. He can be reached at [emailprotected] Noahs Arc runs every other Monday this semester.

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DO | The Social Limelight - Cornell University The Cornell Daily Sun

Human Behavior

Women’s body image more likely to be impacted by pornography if they are high in anxious attachment – PsyPost

Does pornography usage make women more self-conscious about their bodies? A study published in the Computers in Human Behavior journal suggests that this relationship may be related to attachment style to romantic partners.

Body image self-consciousness is something many women struggle with for a myriad of reasons, including the strict societal beauty standards placed on women. Being self-conscious about ones own body is associated with negative body satisfaction, lower sexual self-esteem, and lower self-perceived attractiveness. Body image self-consciousness during sexual activity can lead to a less fulfilling sex life, with decreased sexual functioning and pleasure and increased shame and anxiety.

Attachment theory posters that people seek support and proximity when faced with a threat, and that the level of responsiveness they receive from a caregiver in childhood can have implications for romantic relationships later in life. Attachment theory and body image self-consciousness have not been significantly studied together, and the new research seeks to address that, as well as examine a potential mediating role of pornography usage.

Study author Ateret Gewirtz-Meydan and colleagues conducted an online survey of 1,001 Israeli women ranging from 18 to 56 years of age. Participants completed a demographic survey, an attachment orientation scale, answered how often they consume pornographic content, and completed a measure on body image. Gerwitz-Meydan and colleagues sought to measure if pornography usage mediated the relationship between attachment and body image self-consciousness in this study.

Results showed significant group differences between participants in romantic relationships and participants not in romantic relationships. People in romantic relationships showed lower levels of anxious and avoidant attachment styles and reported lower body-image insecurities and pornography usage. Pornography usage was not a mediator between attachment and body image for women who were not in a romantic relationship and was a significant mediator only for women in a romantic relationship who showed an anxious attachment style. This is consistent with previous research that shows that anxious attachment, not avoidant attachment, predicts body dissatisfaction and insecurity.

This study has implications for treating body image issues by working on attachment style. Despite this advantage, the study has some limitations to speak of. Regarding the sample, it was a convenience sample gathered through social media, which may limit generalizability. This research also focused purely on women, and future research could focus on if similar relationships are found in men. Gerwitz-Meydan and colleagues also left pornography usage as a pretty vague variable, and the relationship may be affected by what type or medium of pornography is consumed.

The findings of the present study extend the literature by utilizing attachment theory to gain a better understanding of how women develop body image self-consciousness during intimate relations, the researchers concluded. Specifically, the findings suggest that women may be more susceptible to the influence of pornography use on their body image self-consciousness when they are anxiously attached and in a romantic relationship.

The study, Attachment insecurities and body image self-consciousness along women: The mediating role of pornography use, was authored by Ateret Gewirtz-Meydan, Kimberly J. Mitchell, Zohar Spivak-Lavi, and Shane W. Kraus.

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Women's body image more likely to be impacted by pornography if they are high in anxious attachment - PsyPost

Human Behavior

Human Population Collapse May Be Closer Than We Think – E/The Environmental Magazine

Courtesy of TRT World Fair Use

Greenhouse gas emissions continued unabated in 2021, and there is no sign that countries are going to honor their commitments to lower them anytime soon. This is evident as the West scrambles for ways to replace Russian fossil fuel supplies as quickly as possible. This means that fossil fuel emissions will not abate, and that we will reach a global mean surface temperature 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than the preindustrial level decades sooner than had previously been predicted. Indeed, 1.5 degrees is the threshold that climate science tells us spells the point at which the effects of global warming will become irreversible and devastating, and will have profound consequences to global ecosystems and to our global civilization.

These impacts are already bad and rapidly worsening. More and hotter heat waves, more frequent and worsening storms, catastrophic flooding, prolonged droughts, wildfires of unprecedented frequency and scale, continuing acidification of the oceans and consequent destruction of marine ecosystems, and a species extinction rate 1,000 times higher than the normal background rate are already wreaking havoc with planetary ecosystems and will only get worse. Feedback loops reinforce these devastating trends, and tipping points threaten to make then suddenly and rapidly turn even more deadly.

All of this promises that, rather than a gradual effect on humankind, the impact of global warming on human population may be rapid and catastrophic. The main compounding factor will be human migration. As heat begins to become an existential threat to the populations in the tropic and subtropic zones, up to three billion people will migrate towards the temperate zones. This is 40% of the human population, and its movement will present an existential threat to the populations in the temperate zones. The inevitable consequence will be conflict on a scale that dwarfs anything in human history.

This conflict, which will manifest itself on national borders across the world, may unleash the use of nuclear weapons that will make the loss of life even more devastating. The deteriorating climate and this unparalleled level of conflict will reduce food production and distribution, and this will further exacerbate the loss of life. As the pace of climate change continues to accelerate, this scenario is likely to play out in a matter of years, not decades, and consequently, the decrease in the human population will be sudden rather than gradual. The following graph shows a potential scenario.

This graph shows two population scenarios. The blue line is the UNs low population scenario. The orange line is a scenario that anticipates a draconian impact of climate change on the human population. It envisions global population peaking in 2030. During the subsequent decade, the scenario projects that population will decrease by one billion as the reproduction rate even in developing countries turns negative, and as the global mortality rate begins to climb. Between 2040 and 2050, this scenario envisions the global human population falling by over six billion people as the human mortality rate soars due to the catastrophic effects of global warming, the reduction of food supplies, global warfare, and the destruction of the infrastructure and communication on which our global civilization depends.

This is speculation. There is no certainty that this scenario will play itself out. But it is not unreasonable speculation. Without a rapid and dramatic change in human behavior on a planetary scale, there is no reason to assume that we are immune from such a horrendous fate.

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Human Population Collapse May Be Closer Than We Think - E/The Environmental Magazine

Human Behavior

New infosec products of the week: March 25, 2022 – Help Net Security

Heres a look at the most interesting products from the past week, featuring releases from AvePoint, DTEX Systems, ExtraHop, NICE Actimize, and Sonrai Security.

NICE Actimizes X-Sight Entity Risk solution delivers data intelligence from a variety of data sources to ensure an entity profile is always accurate and analyzes entity networks and behaviors to provide a single entity trust score which informs detection and prevention systems to power their analytic precision.

Sonrai Security announced its expansion into Cloud Workload Protection (CWPP), with new capabilities that enable enterprise companies to appropriately react to host-based threats according to their immediate severity and business impact.

AvePoints new enhancements automate retention and disposal rules, and provide safe information access retrieval, so that organizations can easily meet requirements and reduce storage overages at the same time.

Reveal(x) 360 Cloud Threat Defense for AWS is purpose-built to stop advanced threats like ransomware, software supply chain attacks, and more. This new offering includes VPC Flow Logs and additional protocol analysis, providing both depth and breadth of visibility for threats in AWS.

The behavioral, contextual workforce intelligence provided by DTEX InTERCEPT extends the capabilities of the Microsoft 365 E5 modules to detect and capture intentional data loss incidents, stop intellectual property theft, pinpoint human behavior attribution as well as malware root cause, and prevents the use and misuse of unsanctioned and sanctioned SaaS applications.

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New infosec products of the week: March 25, 2022 - Help Net Security

Human Behavior

LatticeFlow: The Venture Leader Technology that enables robust and trustworthy AI – Venturelab

28.03.2022 07:00, Isabelle Mitchell

The Venture Leaders Technology expert jury had their work cut out for them this year: They had to look through 180 applications to choose the 10 members of the Swiss National Startup team that will travel to Silicon Valley in April. Before the 10 entrepreneurs meet with international investors and industry leaders to strengthen their business network and advance their globalization, we want to introduce you to each of the 10 Venture Leaders Technology 2022: Meet Petar Tsankov, the co-founder and CEO of LatticeFlow.

Name: Petar TsankovLocation: ZurichNationality: Bulgaria/USAGraduated from: ETH PhD in CS, 2017Job title: Co-founder and CEO of LatticeFlow Number of employees: 12Money raised: USD 2.8 millionFirst touchpoint with Venturelab:In 2022, for theVenture Leaders programPetar, can you summarize what LatticeFlow does?We empower ML [machine learning] teams to deliver robust and performant AI systems, solving a major roadblock to the widespread adoption of AI in our daily lives.How and where did you come up with the idea for your startup?I was reading a Stanford research paper on verifying the correctness of AI models at my ETH office when I realized how we could develop a massively more scalable approach by leveraging techniques from classic program analysis. This idea led to building the worlds first scalable robust AI platform that works on large deep learning models, which form the foundations of modern AI systems. These results triggered significant interest across the industry that was actively looking into solutions that enable safe, robust, and reliable adoption of recent AI advances.What do you expect from the Venture Leaders Technology roadshow, and how will it help you achieve your vision?A fun fact is that it all actually started in San Francisco for us. In early 2020, right before the pandemic hit, I was on a three-week solo roadshow in the US, looking to get feedback from entrepreneurs and investors on our product and business model. The Venture Leaders roadshow is an exciting opportunity to go back and meet these people again. More generally, to build our global brand and become the world leader in robust and trustworthy AI, we need also to win the US market. I expect that the Venture Leaders roadshow will accelerate our expansion into the US market.What is one thing not many people know about you?I had my first professional IT gig when I was 14 years old. A friend of mine took me to his brother-in-laws company to set up a couple of brand new computers and printers in the office. Initially, the company staff was skeptical because of my youthful appearance, but ultimately, I got the work done and was then compensated with an ice cream. They actually took me to my favorite ice cream shop, and I cant say I wasnt thrilled.What is your favorite podcast?Currently, I love Lex Fridmans podcast. Lex is a master at asking simple, direct questions, offering an excellent opportunity to pick into the brains of great minds in business and science. I also enjoy Andrew Hubermans podcast, bringing knowledge about the latest advances in neuroscience, human behavior, and beyond.

What is always in your fridge? Lemons. I always start my day with freshly squeezed lemon in warm water.What are you most proud of? Receiving the John Atanasoff Award from the President of Bulgaria, given once per year to a computer scientist for major research contributions in the domain. I know some of the prior awardees and am proud to have my name next to theirs.How did you come up with the name of your startup?The first startup I co-founded was ChainSecurity, which focused on blockchain security. This time, I wanted a less obvious name that is not directly related to the companys business. My co-founder, Prof. Martin Vechev, came up with LatticeFlow. We always wanted to plug in the term Lattice somewhere, which is the abstract mathematical structure that underpins the theory behind our robust AI platform that initiated all our work on safe, robust, and trustworthy AI.What is your favorite productivity hack?Do what you love with people you admire and are proud to work with. Thats the main hack. Also, work on big problems that matter; this is essential to persevere during difficult times.How and where do you clear your mind to stay productive?I run in the mountains for about 40-50 minutes in the morning. This is the best way to detach from technology, pop up from the daily routine to reflect on what is happening around me, and plan the time ahead. Most of my decisions about what to focus on and prioritize happen while running.What is your greatest professional failure, and what did you learn from it?I forgot about a clients deadlinea security review of a crypto token that was about to launchand received a reminder from the client on Christmas Eve. This happened in the early days of my previous company when I was still reluctant to adopt a calendar to manage my time (I do use a calendar today). My co-founder and I spent Christmas reviewing the code of the crypto token, which ultimately had a successful launch and right now ranks among the most-valued cryptocurrencies on the market with a valuation of nearly USD 500 million.For more information and updates on LatticeFlow and the Venture Leaders Technology 2022, follow#VLeadersTechon social media and onwww.venture-leaders.ch/technology.

The Venture Leaders Technology 2022 program is organized by Venturelab and supported by dpd Switzerland, EPF Lausanne, ETH Zurich, Kellerhals Carrard, Rothschild & Co, and the Canton of Vaud.

LatticeFlow (https://latticeflow.ai/) is an award-winning deep-tech spin-off and creator of the worlds first platform for robust AI models. The company was founded in 2020 by globally leading AI rese... Read more

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LatticeFlow: The Venture Leader Technology that enables robust and trustworthy AI - Venturelab

Human Behavior

Reasearchers find key hormone influences social behavior from areas outside the brain – Newswise

By: Mark Blackwell Thomas | Published: January 10, 2022 | 8:54 am |

Newswise Oxytocins role in regulating and influencing social behavior is well known. Numerous ongoing clinical trials are focusing on the levels of the hormone in the brain but now a Florida State University research team has found evidence that oxytocin receptors outside of the brain may play an important role in shaping social behavior.

Elizabeth Hammock, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience, and her team, including graduate student Manal Tabbaa and undergraduate student Ashley Moses, observed the behavior of mice lacking oxytocin receptors in cells outside of the brain. They found that receptors outside of the brain in other areas of the body could be keys to how oxytocin shapes interactions between animals.

Their study was published in the journal PLOS ONE.

This study shows there is a population of cells outside of the brain that have oxytocin receptors and when that population of cells is missing those receptors, it impacts social behavior, Hammock said. A key takeaway is that to understand oxytocins role in social behavior we need to look at the whole organism. We cant assume the brain is doing all the work.

Hammock said her team removed gene coding for the oxytocin receptor from some cells during pre-natal development.

We left the developing brain alone and instead, specifically removed oxytocin receptors from a population of cells outside of the brain, she said. We let the mice grow to adulthood and then we tested these genetically altered mice and typical mice on some standard social behavior tests routinely used for lab mice.

Hammock said the genetically altered mice in the study exhibited reduced social interest, and males were quicker to show aggression compared to mice that were not genetically altered.

Hammock noted that there are already a number of drugs aimed at regulating oxytocin levels in the brain, with additional clinical trials underway pursuing the same goal. The results of this study suggest scientists may need to broaden their scope.

There are a number of clinical trials attempting to use oxytocin to modulate human behavior and there are research efforts to improve drug delivery to get oxytocin to the brain, she said. Our data suggest we might not need to target the brain if it can regulate behavior through more drug-accessible sites outside of the brain.

She added: We still need to determine if the lack of oxytocin receptors in those specific cells outside of the brain alters the development of the mice causing changes to their adult behavior. If so, it makes drug treatment in adulthood after development more challenging. Also, our study is in mice, not humans, which is important to remember. We have more work to do.

Hammock added: We focus on the brain so much and rightfully so but the brain is an integrated part of a larger system.

For more information, visit https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0260199.

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Reasearchers find key hormone influences social behavior from areas outside the brain - Newswise

Human Behavior

U-M economic expert, others find views on politics, science have driven public response to pandemic – University of Michigan News

FACULTY Q&A

Political persuasion and trust in science have weighed heavily on mask use and compliance with shelter-in-place policies in the U.S. during the pandemic, according to studies co-authored by a University of Michigan doctoral student in economics.

David Van Dijcke

David Van Dijcke and his co-authors found higher support of former President Donald Trump led to lower levels of mask wearing and greater skepticism in science spurred less physical distancing among people and populations.

Van Dijcke, whose work with University of Chicago scholar Austin Wright has been published in the Journal of Public Economics and Nature Human Behaviour, says their collaborations have been a classic pandemic partnership: The pair met by Zoom discussing each others work and proceeded to collaborate on four papers before meeting in person.

A conversation with Van Dijcke follows.

Do you see these studies as complementary? Does the second pick up where the first leaves off, or fill out the picture?

Yes, they are complementary in the sense that they study different drivers of noncompliance with public health policy during the COVID-19 pandemic in the states: Our Nature Human Behavior paper establishes that science skepticism affected whether people adhered to the stay-at-home orders issued in the first few months of the pandemic, while our Journal of Public Economics paper documents how partisanship was the most important predictor of mask wearing in July 2020.

There are several other studies with complementary findings, for example, showing that partisanship also played a role in compliance with stay-at-home-orders.

Do you see any contradictions between them? I know this is a bit of apples and oranges: focusing on science skepticism and shelter-in-place policies vs. partisanship and mask mandates. But I wonder how important is this distinction?

Thats an important question. We put a lot of effort into making sure that the mechanisms we studyscience skepticism and partisanshipwere indeed the real drivers of this noncompliance, and not proxies for some other underlying causes. In particular, there is a strong correlation between both mechanisms: Republican-leaning voters tend to be more skeptical of scientific authorities and expertise, and so one could easily think that the noncompliance with these public health mandates we study is driven completely by either one or the other.

For that reason, in both studies, we allow for the possibility that there are these other factors also influencing noncompliance: science skepticism, partisanship, education, income. In our Journal of Public Economics paper, we even allow for the number of bowling organizations to affect mask wearing. Nonetheless, we consistently find that science skepticism and partisanship played an important, independent role.

When it comes to comparing mask-wearing to shelter-in-place policies, our findings suggest they are in some sense two different aspects of the same phenomenon: compliance with public health policies. For example, in our Nature paper, we also document a strong positive correlation between science skepticism and mask-wearing, although data limitations didnt allow us to study that further.

As I mentioned, there is also a body of recent research looking at the role partisanship played in the efficacy of the shelter-in-place policies. An important distinction between both policies, however, is that shelter-in-place policies incur substantial economic and societal costs to achieve reduction of viral spread, while mask-wearing essentially does not incur any costs, even as a rapidly expanding body of scientific work has demonstrated that it can be very effective in slowing the virus down.

In that light, it is somewhat surprising that we found such an important role for partisanship in mask-wearing: There appears to be no material reason to strongly oppose it, beyond signaling that you belong to a certain political tribe. It is true that at the start of the pandemic, there was some uncertainty around face masks, with some scientists worrying about self-infection and the World Health Organization recommending against their general use. That initial ambiguity may have opened the way for the subsequent politicization that we document, though that is mostly speculation.

For many, these studies will confirm what they thought to be true but backed by rigorous research. What was your reaction to the findings? What surprised or jumped out at you, if anything?

When we set out with this research, we had some preconceptions about what we would find and, indeed, our results largely confirmed those preconceptionsthey arent surprising in that sense. For example, for our Journal of Public Economics paper, we set out with the hypothesis that partisanship did indeed play a role in mask-wearing.

We did not expect to find, however, that partisanship is a more important predictor of mask-wearing than any other factor we could find data on. That really struck us. It also immediately informs policy: Fix the politicization of mask-wearing and you will start seeing a whole lot more masks around.

I think thats where the contribution of this kind of research really lies: to provide solid empirical evidence for the drivers of politico-economic issues, and to put precise magnitudes on the importance of these drivers. Its easy to say, based on anecdotes, X has been an extremely big issue during the pandemic.

Our work puts nuance on the following statements: How big of an issue is it? Is it really an issue, or is it masking some other underlying problem? How can policy mitigate the detrimental effects of X? That is something for which you need good data, good statistics and careful research.

You and your co-author, Austin Wright, also published a working paper last year that found Americans who attended the Jan. 6, 2021, rally-turned-riot around and within the U.S. Capitol were more likely to have traveled there from Trump-voting islands and areas with chapters of the far-right, extremist Proud Boys organization. There is a rich vein of research here. What attracts you to it and where do you see it going?

We had two main objectives with that piece of research. First, we wanted to show how one can use mobile device data to move the study of protests and collective action forward. So far, researchers have mostly relied on surveys and social media to look at who participates in collective action and why.

While those can be useful sources of information, they are often incomplete and biased. Not everyone who participates in protests, riots or the like is willing to tell statisticians about it, or posts on social media about it. With mobile device data, however, you can paint a more representative picture, and we show how researchers can do that using anonymized, aggregated mobile device data that respects individuals privacy.

Second, we then applied these methods we developed to study what we consider to be a historical moment in contemporary American politics: the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6. By linking the device data with anonymized and aggregated Census data, we were able to look at what types of neighborhoods the devices were coming from. This allowed us to map out the political geography of this culmination of partisan division, to try and find out what made people attend this event.

As you mentioned, one of our main results is that we found that people who lived in Trump-voting areas that were surrounded by more Clinton-voting areas were more likely to have attended the rally and subsequent insurrection. Though there is a body of work in sociology on the effects of negative intergroup contact, this type of geographic political segregation has really not been studied before, and so our focus going forward is on trying to understand it better, especially how it may lead one to attend protests aimed at contesting free and fair election results.

Taking it all together, what are the key takeaways or recommendations for society and public policy? How do you frame it all together?

The main takeaway for public policy and American society, in my opinion, is that there is an urgent need for the safeguarding and development of mechanisms that are immune to disagreement and division. For public health policy, for example, we provide several examples from the literature on science communication, which has found that actively preempting science skepticism and misinformation in the communication and implementation of public policy can help facilitate compliance with such policy by citizens.

In that case, it is really crucial to know what type of division and disagreement may undermine policy so it can be addressed from the get-go and is not allowed to fester. In the case of the storming of the Capitol and the upholding of the election result, democratic institutions have, to some extent, held up, but I think it is clear that there is a lot of work to do in further immunizing them to future attacks.

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U-M economic expert, others find views on politics, science have driven public response to pandemic - University of Michigan News

Human Behavior

Perceptive Automata Named One of the Best Companies to Work for the Third Consecutive Year – Woburn Daily Times

BOSTON, Jan. 10, 2022 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Perceptive Automata, the leading provider of technology that allows AI-powered autonomous systems to understand human behavior, has been named one of the 100 Best Places to Work, 50 Best Small Places to Work, and 50 Companies with Best Benefits in 2022 by Built In Boston.

"Our employees are the reason that Perceptive Automata is an incredible place to work," said Bruce Reading, CEO of Perceptive Automata. "We work hard to build a workplace that offers great benefits, career growth, and an inclusive company culture. With the excitement of a startup and the stability of a market leader, we try to combine the best of both worlds. But a successful workplace is all about people, so these recognitions are a testament to our employees."

Perceptive Automata's culture is built on creating a comfortable work environment with a strong sense of family and community. Our community-oriented culture and our employees' wellbeing are enhanced by flexible remote working options, paid lunches, company-funded at-home workstations, and activities like game nights, charity events, and remote dinner parties. Everyone also has the opportunity to participate in supplementary training courses, academic conferences, and industry workshops funded by the company. Additionally, Perceptive Automata hosts a quarterly Innovation Week, which allows employees to team up and brainstorm new ways to improve our company, product, and industry for awards and prizes.

Built In Boston is part of the Built In network, which is the largest online community of technology companies and startups - serving millions of professionals nationally. Each year, Built In evaluates companies and determines winners based on how they measure against industry data related to employees' requirements and expectations of their employers, as well as a company's commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and its culture.

About Perceptive Automata

Perceptive Automata is creating best-in-class artificial intelligence technology that gives machines, such as self-driving vehicles, the ability to understand the human state of mind. The company combines behavioral science techniques with machine learning to give autonomous systems the capability to anticipate and react to human behavior like people do, enabling autonomous vehicles to navigate safely and smoothly around pedestrians, cyclists, and other drivers. This is essential for autonomous vehicles to seamlessly roll out in human-dominated road environments and to deliver a smooth ride experience for passengers of autonomous mobility services. For more information about Perceptive Automata, visit http://www.perceptiveautomata.com.

Media Contact

Anthony Cote, Perceptive Automata, +1 (401) 529-0147, anthony@perceptiveautomata.com

SOURCE Perceptive Automata

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Perceptive Automata Named One of the Best Companies to Work for the Third Consecutive Year - Woburn Daily Times