First meeting of the new semester and year: welcome!

Program: our first meeting will be arranged as an informal and interactive seminar to present the lab members and hear more about current and prospective students’ interests, projects and ideas. Members of the lab will briefly present their research and share research (ongoing or new) that may possibly inspire some theses.

Discussions are welcome and encouraged!

Risk and decision making during the Coronavirus pandemic

Program: Harald Ulrik Sverdrup (INN) and Jan Wright (OsloMet – CSBE LAB) will present their work on risk assessment, systems dynamics and decision making with special attention to the special context due to the outbreak of the coronavirus.

The title of Jan’s presentation is “Risk based mitigation of the Covid-19 pandemic”, which is based on a recent article that has been accepted for publication in the International Journal of Risk and Contingency Management.

The paper presentation will be followed by a discussion in plenum.

Principles of a behavioral vaccine, cultural implications and community resilience

Program: Two papers will be presented. the first one was written by Kalliu C. Couto, Flora M. Lorenzo, Marco Tagliabue, Marcelo B. Henriques, and Roberta F. Lemos and targets underlying behavioral principles of a vaccine and how to scale them up at the cultural level thorugh the concept of metacontingnecies.

The second paper by Fabio Bento and Kalliu C. Couto targets community resilience taking the case of Paraisópolis in São Paulo, Brazil.

Organizational responses to the Coronavirus in schools and education, and data security

Program: Puspa Khanal, Fabio Bento and Marco Tagliabue will be presenting their scoping review of school responses to the outbreak from a complexity perspective

The second presentation will be based on the article of Fabio Bento, Andréa Bottino, Janimayri Forastieri, Fabiana Rodrigues, Felipe Cerchiareto, who have been looking into lecturers’ adaptive processes during the pandemic.

Finally, Ann Kristin Sjøflot will present her research project on data security and a pilot version of the questionnaire that she will be using.

Guests’ presentations and fixed/growth mindset

Program: Sara Ingvarsson, PhD candidate and organizational expert at Karolinska Institutet, will present on Which organizational factors contributes to the overuse of Low Value Care and what strategies can help reduce the use of these practices?*

Next, Farina Wille from Technische Universität Braunschweig will be presenting herself and her work at the department of psychological methodology and biopsychology. Title: Degrees of freedom in allocating behavior – two ways to look at it in the context of electrical energy systems.**

The third part of the meeting will feature Essy Mwaislage og Toyha Ruud, who are working with fixed/groth mindset in collaboration with NudgeIt.

*”Within health care there is a large number of practices being used that costs money without any clear benefit for the patients or the society. These practices are called Low Value Care. Examples are cancer screening, imaging, lab tests, surgical and non-surgical procedures and different types of medications. Sara is currently working on two parallel studies. The first study aims at analysing what organizational factors influence the use of Low Value Care from a Behaviour Systems perspective. Thus far Sara has conducted interviews with managers within primary care in Region Stockholm and started to analyse the data. The second study is in planning phase and is an intervention study aiming at testing strategies to reduce low value care within primary care.”

**”As part of my time as a doctoral student at the Division of Research Methods and Biopsychology at the Technische Universität Braunschweig, I worked in an interdisciplinary project team with mainly academic partners from technical fields such as electrical engineering. We were looking at perspectives for a more sustainable electrical energy system and one aspect I found interesting, was the importance of taking into account activity patterns of humans and their degrees of freedom. During the presentation, I would like to share two realized ideas for looking at behavioral patterns and their degrees of freedom with exemplary results and some thoughts on future points of investigation.”

System dynamics (postponed)

UPDATE. The topic of today’s Lab meeting (i.e., systems dynamics) had to be postponed to a later date, which will be announced on our schedule. Instead, members of the Lab will be available to answer questions and provide feedback to students’ and Lab’s current projects

Seminar: Culturo-behavior and Complexity Perspectives on Responses to the Covid-19 Pandemic

The purpose of the Seminar is to promote a dialogue between researchers and policy makers on variables involved in mitigation, contagion containment, resilience, and decision making in outbreaks situations. The Seminar will focus on topics such as (a) Risk and decision making during the Covid-19 pandemic, (b) Behavioral principles underlying protective and risk behaviors, and culturo-behavior strategies for promoting sustainable coordinated responses, (c) Community resilience in the case of Paraisópolis/SP, and (d) Organizational responses to the Coronavirus in schools and education.

Invited Discussants (EDITED):

Cláudio Maierovitch: Sanitary doctor from Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, former president of the National Health Surveillance Agency of Brazil and former director of the Department of Communicable Disease Surveillance, from the Brazilian Ministry of Health.

Fernando Augusto Bozza, M.D., Ph.D – Senior Scientist and Head of Critical Care at the National Institute of Infectious Disease Evandro Chagas, Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, Ministry of Health, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Bozza’s research team activities involve clinical and translational research on severe emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases. During the COVID-19 pandemic his group has worked on the impact of pandemic in Brazilian health system, iniquity in hospital mortality, evolution of mortality in critical care, host immune response, and the development of new therapies. Bozza developed an initiative for test, track and trace COVID-19 cases with more than 2 million downloads and 350,000 free testing (app Dados do Bem). “Dados do Bem” has also been applied in an integrated model of surveillance and health care to mitigate the impact of pandemic in vulnerable communities.

Projects and network

Program: Anne Helena Mortensen is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Health Sciences at OsloMet. She will be introducing herself and her work focusing on retirement homes residents.

Eirik Løvås is a masters’ student in Behavioral Sciences. He will be presenting his project titled:

Network of a Lone-Actor: Social Reinforcement of Extremist Ideals
Research question: How alone are lone-actor terrorists and what role does social reinforcement have in the process of radicalizing and extremising individuals towards extremist acts of terrorism?

Although much have been done in researching the extreme individuals/terrorists in other fields, the amount of behavior analytical studies is in few numbers. This thesis therefore aims at contributing to the field of extremist research with a behavior analytical view.

Social network analysis in this thesis is utilized to determine whether the lone-actor Anders Behring Breivik (ABB) was alone or if he had a network of radicals/extremists that socially reinforced ABB and helped the further development of extremist ideals and behavior.

Laslty, there will be time for updates from other students and the possibility of sharing feedback on their projects.

ABAI Presentations

Program: Marco Tagliabue presents his poster at ABAI titled

Flora presentes her poster at ABAI.

Consortium and BSPA conference

Program: Harald Stokkeland presents his work in in the consortium between Norway and Romania and possible future project involvement.

Marco Tagliabue shares a summary and highlights of the recent behavioral insights and policy association’s (BSPA) annual conference that was held online in May. You may read more about the association here: https://behavioralpolicy.org/

ABAI seminar

Program: We will be sharing the presentations, symposia, and posters that Lab members delivered at the annual ABAI conference online.

Any other presentations and contributions form the students are welcome. Please note that this is our last meeting before the summer break.

Have a lovely summer and see you back in August!:)