Website of the EU-funded Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship "Staying at home - the interplay between behavioural synchronisation and physical distancing in prosocial behaviour" (STAY)

The project was conceived in the context of the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and efforts to contain the spread of the virus using non-pharmaceutical measures such as physical distancing. The initial overarching goal of the project was to understand how social and emotional interaction processes can sustain prosocial behaviour that prevents the spreading of a pandemic. Due to the delay in starting and executing the project, the project aim shifted considerably: in the later years of the pandemic prevention measures shifted from non-pharmaceutical intervention measures to vaccinations. Alongside this shift, new challenges emerged regarding the combination of non-pharmaceutical and pharmaceutical intervention measures, the stability of the healthcare system, and vaccination hesitancy linked to the spread of misinformation.

Within the scope of these new challenges, my project addresses three distinct issues: (i) what is the best combination of non-pharmaceutical intervention measures and vaccinations in the context of university teaching and is presence teaching feasible with new, more infectious strains of the Corona virus? (ii) Are healthcare systems able to absorb shocks to the availability of doctors, for example due to a high rate of quarantine of doctors caused by a spreading virus? (iii) How can we measure and explain the spread of misinformation particularly in online environments?

Answering these questions is important for society, as a new pandemic is only a matter of time, particularly given the higher rate of zoonotic virus transmissions due to the warming climate. New pandemics will likely follow a similar development of events, from an initial phase where non-pharmaceutical interventions are central, to a phase were vaccinations are available for parts of the population and need to be combined with non-pharmaceutical interventions to achieve the desired reduction in disease spread, to a final phase were vaccinations are broadly available and the remaining challenges are more social in nature, relating to the population's trust in the efficacy of vaccinations and associated vaccination hesitancy. My research contributes to an understanding of the emergent phenomena at play in all these phases.

Next to providing the first large-scale investigation of intervention measures in an university context, I also created an Open Source Python package for simulations of pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical intervention measures in small environments. The package allows for an easy extension of the simulation framework to other contexts such as schools or nursing homes, or other environments with a small (up to 100.000) number of people.

Our work on the resilience of the Austrian healthcare system is groundbreaking as it provides the first application of a simulation-based risk-assessment framework otherwise only known from financial systems to a healthcare system. Of particular interest is also our interactive visualisation of the research results that enables healthcare system planners to analyse the robustness of the healthcare system in different regions and for different doctor specialisations. We have been in contact with Austrian healthcare system planners and plan to continue work in this line of research in a future project.

Lastly, with our work "From alternative conceptions of honesty to alternative facts in communications by US politicians" published in Nature Human Behaviour, we provide a completely new measurement instrument to detect "belief-speaking" and "fact-speaking" language components in text. Using these instruments, we provide a new explanation for the spread of misinformation by political elites. This research line is also continued by the EU-funded PRODEMINFO project where I continue to collaborate with a large number of interdisciplinary researchers on misinformation related projects and a number of publications are forthcoming.

* Denotes equal contributions.

• Jana Lasser, Timotheus Hell, David Garcia, Assessment of the Effectiveness of Omicron Transmission Mitigation Strategies for European Universities Using an Agent-Based Network Model, Journal of Clinical Infectious Diseases (2022).
• Jana Lasser, Segun Taofeek Aroyehun, Fabio Carrella, Almog Simchon, David Garcia, Stephan Lewandowsky, From Alternative conceptions of honesty to alternative facts in communications by U.S. politicians, Nature Human Behaviour (2023).
• Michaela Kaleta*, Jana Lasser*, Elma Dervic, Liuhuaying Yang, Johannes Sorger, D. Ruggiero Lo Sardo, Stefan Thurner, Alexandra Kautzky-Willer, Peter Klimek, Stress-testing the resilience of the Austrian healthcare system using agent-based simulation, Nature Communications (2022).
• Jana Lasser, Segun Taofeek Aroyehun, Almog Simchon, Fabio Carrella, David Garcia, Stephan Lewandowsky, Social media sharing by political elites: An asymmetric American exceptionalism, PNAS nexus (2023).
• Hause Lin, Jana Lasser, Stephan Lewandowsky, Rocky Cole, Andrew Gully, David Rand, and Gordon Pennycook, High level of agreement across different news domain quality ratings, PNAS nexus (2023).
• Aleksandra Urman, Ivan Smirnov, Jana Lasser, The right to audit and the asymmetry of power in computational social science research, EPJ Data Science (2024).
• Jana Lasser, Jürgen Schneider, Thomas Lösch, Ronny Röwert, Tamara Heck, Clemens Bluemel, Maike Neufend, Isabel Steinhardt, Stefan Skupien, MapOSR - A mapping review dataset of empirical studies on Open Science, F1000 research (2022).

• Fabio Carrella, Segun Taofeek Aroyehun, Jana Lasser, Almog Simchon, David Garcia, and Stephan Lewandowsky, The 'Truth Contagion' Effect in the US Political Online Debate, PsyArXiv (2024).
• Jana Lasser*, Alina Herderich*, Joshua Garland, Segun Aroyehun, David Garcia, Mirta Galesic, Collective moderation of hate, toxicity, and extremity in online discussions, arXiv (2024).
• Ahmadou Wagne, Elen Le Foll, Florentine Frantz, Jana Lasser, Giving the outrage a name – how researchers are challenging employment conditions under the hashtags #IchBinHanna and #IchBinReyhan, SocArXiv (2024).