Magda Osman

University of Cambridge | Cam · Centre for Science and Policy (CSaP)

To appear in Trends in Cognitive Science. Abstract: Behavioural change techniques are currently used by many global organisations and public institutions. The amassing evidence base is used to answer practical and scientific questions regarding what cognitive, affective, and environment factors lead to successful behavioural change in the lab and...

This study aims to expand our understanding of institutional trust by examining how consumers express their trust in a UK product safety regulator, the Office for Product Safety and Standards (OPSS). It uses publicly available data from two waves of nationally representative surveys (N = 20,526) conducted by OPSS between November 2020 and August 20...

In the last decade there has been a proliferation of research on misinformation. One important aspect of this work that receives less attention than it should is exactly why misinformation is a problem. To adequately address this question, we must first look to its speculated causes and effects. We examined different disciplines (computer science,...

The present study investigates the relation of procedural transparency and compliance with authorities’ regulations. The underlying assumption is that procedural transparency encourages compliance with regulations. In an incentivized experiment, 666 participants took on the role of a business owner and had to fill in a form and spend a certain amou...

In 2021 we presented an interim analysis of reported deaths associated with Covid-19 using data from the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS). This work applies the same analytical approach used on the original 250 reports from the December 2020 to March 2021 VAERS dataset, to a larger collection containing 1012 reports from the December...

The COVID‐19 pandemic increased sales of portable UV‐C devices as a means of inactivating the SARS‐CoV‐2 virus. Research suggests that excessive UV‐C exposure to the eyes and skin can lead to side‐effects, primarily photokeratitis and erythema, but these findings are limited to case studies. This study explores self‐reported side‐effects of UV‐C de...

To help advance exchanges between science and policy, a useful first step is to examine the questions which policymakers pose to scientists. The style of a question indicates what the asker is motivated to know, and how they might use that knowledge. Therefore, the aggregate pattern of typical policy inquires can help scientists anticipate what typ...

Financial (dis)incentives (e.g., bonuses, taxes) and social incentives (e.g., public praise) have typically been proposed as methods to encourage greater cooperation for the benefit of all. However, when cooperation requires exertion of effort, such interventions might not always be effective. While incentives tend to be highly motivating when choo...

Zoonoses represent a global public health threat. Understanding lay perceptions of risk associated with these diseases can better inform proportionate policy interventions that mitigate their current and future impacts. While individual zoonoses (e.g. bovine spongiform encephalopathy) have received scientific and public attention, we know little ab...

Background In the context of high-risk surgery, shared decision-making (SDM) can be hindered by misalignment in expectations regarding the likely surgical outcomes between patients and clinicians. This study investigates the extent of this misalignment in high-risk patients and doctors involved in perioperative care, its’ impact on treatment choice...

This study presents the first sociolinguistic examination of communication in a social dilemma. 90 participants (18 groups of 5) completed a modified public goods game with 2 rounds: an effort-based task and an unscripted online chat about the results. A linear regression shows that consensus-building language in the Round 1 chat affects cooperativ...

To help advance exchanges between science and policy, a useful first step is to examine the questions which policy professionals pose to scientists. The style of a question indicates what the asker is motivated to know, and how they might use that knowledge. Therefore, the aggregate pattern of typical policy inquires can help scientists anticipate...

To help advance exchanges between science and policy, a useful first step is to examine the questions that policy professionals pose to scientists. The structure of a question provides valuable indicators of what one is motivated to know, and what that knowledge might be used for. Therefore, understanding the pattern of inquiries typically made can...

A complete understanding of decision-making in military domains requires gathering insights from several fields of study. To make the task tractable, here we consider a specific example of short-term tactical decisions under uncertainty made by the military at sea. Through this lens, we sketch out relevant literature from three psychological tasks...

In the main, work has focused on defining and conceptualising the term misinformation, why and how people share misinformation, as well as the consequences for individual behaviour and policy making. Misinformation is an especially live issue in the context of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, and the communication that people use to inform their interpreta...

In the last decade there has been a proliferation of research on misinformation. One important aspect that receives less attention is why exactly misinformation is a problem. To adequately address this question, we must determine its cause(s) and effect(s). This review therefore explores the way different disciplines (computer science, economics, h...

To date, it is still unclear whether there is a systematic pattern in the errors made in eyewitness recall and whether certain features of a person are more likely to lead to false identification. Moreover, we also do not know the extent of systematic errors impacting identification of a person from their body rather than solely their face. To addr...

The present study examined the role of individual differences (e.g., age, gender, education level, political affiliation, religiosity) and stance (general vs. personal) on contexts associated with manipulations without awareness. In all three studies, people were presented with several real-world contexts. They first rated the extent to which there...

Clinically trained reviewers have undertaken a detailed analysis of a sample of the early deaths reported in VAERS (250 out of the 1644 deaths recorded up to April 2021). The focus is on the extent to which the reports enable us to understand whether the vaccine genuinely caused or contributed to the deaths. Contrary to claims that most of these re...

Conversations around critical illness outcomes and benefits from intensive care unit (ICU) treatment have begun to shift away from binary discussions on living versus dying. Increasingly, the reality of survival with functional impairment versus survival with a late death is being recognised as relevant to patients. Most ICU admissions are associat...

People make judgments of others based on appearance, and these inferences can affect social interactions. Although the importance of facial appearance in these judgments is well established, the impact of the body morphology remains unclear. Specifically, it is unknown whether experimentally varied body morphology has an impact on perception of thr...

Behavioral change techniques may show positive changes to sustainable consumption, but as with many other domains, how they interact with other typical regulatory measures is unknown. To address the empirical lacuna, the present study uses a discrete-choice set-up to simulate a lunchtime canteen in order to investigate the effects of choice preserv...

Purpose To understand factors affecting adherence to GFD by celiac and non-celiac people through the application of behavioural theories, Integrative Model (IM) and Multi Theory Model (MTM). Methods Analyses were conducted for a sample of 308 subjects, majority females, celiac and non-celiac. Adherence to GFD was measured considering two scales, s...

As food technology continues to advance, the potential for new food products to enter the food market grows, attracting considerable media interest. Whilst previous research has explored public perceptions of food-related hazards, much of this took place over 10 years ago. Continued technological developments have yielded new food products, for whi...

Behavioural change techniques are currently used by many global organisations and public institutions. The amassing evidence base is used to answer practical and scientific questions regarding what cognitive, affective, and environment factors lead to successful behavioural change in the laboratory and in the field. In this piece we show that there...

This short paper explains (using a Bayesian analysis) why the UK Government claim of an imminent exponenential increase in number of Covid19 cases that would overwhelm the NHS is not supported by evidence.

When analysing Covid-19 death rates by ethnicity in the USA it has been shown that, although the aggregated death rate for whites is higher than for blacks, in each main age subcategory the death rate for blacks is higher than for whites. This apparent statistical anomaly is an example of Simpson's paradox. While the paradox reveals blacks are more...

Concerns about the practicality and effectiveness of using Contact Tracing Apps (CTA) to reduce the spread of COVID19 have been well documented and, in the UK, led to the abandonment of the NHS CTA shortly after its release in May 2020. One of the key non-technical obstacles to widespread adoption of CTA has been concerns about privacy. We present...

Background: Typically, food-related risk assessments are carried out within a four step, technical framework, as detailed by the Codex Alimentarius Commission (World Health Organization/ Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, 2015). However, the technical framework presumes a level of ‘objective risk’ and does not take into accou...

The academic literature continues to amass a vast amount of empirical work examining the effect of nudges in a variety of contexts designed to improve life style choices in alignment with social policies. In fact, the literature is so vast, there are now meta-analytic studies designed to determine the overall effects of different types of nudges us...

Widely reported statistics on Covid-19 across the globe fail to take account of both the uncertainty of the data and possible explanations for this uncertainty. In this article, we use a Bayesian Network (BN) model to estimate the Covid-19 infection prevalence rate (IPR) and infection fatality rate (IFR) for different countries and regions, where r...

As food technology continues to advance, the potential for new food products to enter the food market grows, attracting considerable media interest. Whilst previous research has explored public perceptions of food-related hazards, much of this took place over 10 years ago. Continued technological developments have yielded new food products, for whi...

Background: Contact Tracing Apps (CTA) received increasing media attention during 2020. Most attention debated confidentiality and privacy issues, while governments promoted CTA as a primary tool for COVID-19 spread containment with little contemplation for whether these apps could even be effective in this role. Method: This paper uses a review of...

Widely reported statistics on Covid-19 across the globe fail to take account of both the uncertainty of the data and possible explanations for this uncertainty. In this paper we use a Bayesian Network (BN) model to estimate the Covid-19 infection prevalence rate (IPR) and infection fatality rate (IFR) for different countries and regions, where rele...

In this paper we speculate about what will likely happen in the next 12 months (time of writing this is March 2020). Here we will simply articulate our predictions, some of which might be accompanied with our own rationale for making them, but others will not.

Many digital solutions mainly involving Bluetooth technology are being proposed for Contact Tracing Apps (CTA) to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Concerns have been raised regarding privacy, consent, uptake required in a given population, and the degree to which use of CTAs can impact individual behaviours. The introduction of a new CTA alone will n...

Many digital solutions mainly involving Bluetooth technology are being proposed for Contact Tracing Apps (CTA) to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Concerns have been raised regarding privacy, consent, uptake required in a given population, and the degree to which use of CTAs can impact individual behaviours. However, very few groups have taken a holi...

In this study, we investigated how people evaluate behavioral interventions (BIs) that are targeted at themselves, aiming to promote their own health and wellbeing. We compared the impact on people's assessments of the acceptability of using BIs to change their own behavior of: the transparency of the BI (transparent or opaque); the designer of the...

COVID-19 testing strategies are primarily driven by medical need - focusing on people already hospitalized with significant symptoms or on people most at risk. However, such testing is highly biased because it fails to identify the extent to which COVID-19 is present in people with mild or no symptoms. If we wish to understand the true rate of COVI...

Psychiatry understands narcissism as a pathological condition associated with poor social outcomes and difficulty relating to others. Millennials have been depicted by psychological research as ‘narcissistic’, and the term has lost accurate meaning. We underline the intellectual laxity of conflating social changes with narcissism and suggest ways f...

A person is labelled as having COVID-19 infection either from a positive PCR-based diagnostic test, or by a health professional's assessment of the clinical picture in a process described by some as symptom screening. There is considerable fragility in the resulting data as both of these methods are susceptible to human biases in judgment and decis...

In this paper we speculate about what will likely happen in the next 12 months (time of writing this is March 2020). Here we will simply articulate our predictions, some of which might be accompanied with our own rationale for making them, but others will not.

Neuroscientific studies reliably demonstrate that rewards play a crucial role in guiding our choices when confronted with different effortful actions we could make. At the same time, psychological and economic research shows that effort we exert is not reliably predicted by the rewards we end up receiving. Why the mismatch between the two lines of...

We know little about the commonality of folk beliefs around applications of psychological research on the unconscious control of behaviours. To address this, in Experiment 1 (N = 399) participants volunteered examples of where research on the unconscious has been applied to influence their behaviours. A subset of these were presented in Experiment...

The idea of uncertainty analyses, which typically involves quantification, is to protect practitioners and consumers from drawing unsubstantiated conclusions from scientific assessments of risk. The importance of causal modelling in this process – along with the inference methods associated with such modelling – is now increasingly widely recognize...

Many approaches (e.g., formal modelling, Futures Studies) taken to understanding global food futures tend to treat the consumer as an outcome of the global food system, rather than a central component of it. Nonetheless, in order to address some of the forecasted problems (e.g., sustainable consumption), it has been consumer attitudes and behaviour...

Background: The gluten-free market is expanding rapidly. The reasons for this reflect a growing interest in adopting a gluten-free diet (GFD). This is partly explained by an increasing number of people diagnosed with Celiac Disease (CD), but also because of public perceptions that a GFD is a healthy diet option. However, products specifically marke...

Complex problem solving (CPS) and related topics such as dynamic decision-making (DDM) and complex dynamic control (CDC) represent multifaceted psychological phenomena. In a broad sense, CPS encompasses learning, decision-making, and acting in complex and dynamic situations. Moreover, solutions to problems that people face in such situations are of...

The aim of this article is to cover three things: (1) to introduce the context behind why a report prepared by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 2017 would be of such importance to researchers in various academic disciplines and public policy, (2) to present the details of a simple classification system that was a...

Is the inferred preference of a deceased relative to donate his or her organs stronger when the choice was made under a mandated rather than under an automatic default (i.e., nudged choice) legislative system? The answer to this is particularly important, because families can, and do, veto the choices of their deceased relatives. In three studies,...

According to a popular model of self-control, willpower depends on a limited resource that can be depleted when we perform a task demanding self-control. This theory has been put to the test in hundreds of experiments showing that completing a task that demands high self-control usually hinders performance in any secondary task that subsequently ta...

In 2005, Quesada, Kintsch, and Gomez titled a paper „Complex problem-solving: A field in search of a definition “. Thirteen years later, it seems that the field has found it in the form of multiple (or minimal) complex systems such as MicroDYN. While MicroDYN certainly has brought the field a boost of attention and serves as a standard of compariso...

Social policy interventions, such as nudges (behavioral change techniques), have gained significant traction globally. But what do the public think? Does the type of expert proposing a nudge influence the kinds of evaluations the public make about nudges? Three experiments investigated this by presenting U.S. (N=689) and U.K. (N=978) samples with d...

In the present study we ask, Does empathy also support cooperative behaviors when the status (high, low) of an individual differs relative to other group members and is determined by either chance or effort? In response to this unexplored question, the present study involved a series of 4 experiments using a linear public goods game (Experiment 1–3...

Over 3 million people in Hong Kong and 21 million people in the UK are saving for retirement under the mandatory provident fund and individual savings account schemes, respectively. Yet, we know little about how individual preferences, such as risk attitudes (risk-seeking and risk-averse) that are known to impact highly consequential decisions in a...

According to a popular model of self-control, willpower depends on a limited resource that can be depleted when we perform a task demanding self-control. Over the last five years, the reliability of the empirical evidence supporting this model has become the subject of heated debate. In the present study, we reanalysed data from a large-scale study...

Nudges are psychologically informed tools designed to promote behavioral change in order to improve health and well-being. In this review, we focus on three areas of concern: theory, evidence base, ethics. We begin by discussing the problems arising from the theoretical framework that nudges are based on and propose an alternative framework that he...

The aim of this piece is to clarify three key matters: (a) the extent to which, as citizens, our volition is impacted as a result of the implementation of nudges in the health domain; (b) the efficacy of educational campaigns as a means of behavioral change relative to other nudges as well as typical regulatory instruments; and (c) the empirical, t...

Much of human decision making occurs in dynamic situations where decision makers have to control a number of interrelated elements (dynamic systems control). Although in recent years progress has been made toward assessing individual differences in control performance, the cognitive processes underlying exploration and control of dynamic systems ar...

Healthcare education institutions are increasingly including arts-based interventions in their programmes. We analysed 62 studies of arts-based interventions to understand how these interventions may be beneficial, and why providing evidence continues to be a challenge for the field. Our analysis highlighted two issues. We found that 79% of the inc...

Public regulators (such as European Food Safety Authority, European Medicines Agency, and European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control) are placing increasing demands on scientists to make uncertainties about their evidence transparent to the public. The stated goal is utilitarian, to inform and empower the public and ensure the accountabilit...

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has long been an advocate of greater transparency. One of the tools promoted to achieve more transparency is to describe the underlying uncertainties within EFSA’s scientific opinions. The key issue though is whether members of the European public actually want to know more about the details of the scientif...

Are animals capable of empathy, problem-solving, or even self-recognition? Much research is dedicated to answering these questions and yet few studies have considered how humans form beliefs about animal minds. Evidence suggests that our mentalising of animals is a natural consequence of Theory of Mind (ToM) capabilities. However, where beliefs reg...

In this review we make a simple theoretical argument which is that for theory development, computational modeling, and general frameworks for understanding moral psychology researchers should build on domain-general principles from reasoning, judgment, and decision-making research. Our approach is radical with respect to typical models that exist i...