The Social Science Research Council welcomes the University of Denver to the College and University Fund for the Social Sciences, joining 50 institutions of higher education dedicated to connecting across disciplines and institutions to support impactful social and behavioral science that produces new knowledge and advances the common good.
We are so grateful to announce that the Social Science Research Council has not only met but also has exceeded its ambitious $100M Centennial Campaign goal. Since the Campaign’s public launch in January of 2023, the Council’s Centennial year, we have raised $101,349,064 in program and operating support for the Council’s work. The robust philanthropic
Over the course of the past three years, the Social Science Research Council’s Mercury Project has supported 18 research teams working around the globe to evaluate interventions designed to increase vaccination and other preventive health behaviors. This month, we share findings from the Bihar Information and Media Literacy Initiative (BIMLI) and Knowledge Versus Skills, two Mercury Project experiments that tested different strategies to help individuals in India and Sierra Leone better distinguish between true and false health information.
A Mercury Project team conducted an experiment in Sierra Leone to investigate whether educational videos could increase the discernment and sharing of accurate health information. The videos increased discernment of accurate health information by 12% and increased the willingness to share accurate health information by 32%. This post is part of our Mercury Project Findings series on Health Information Literacy Trainings.
A Mercury Project team conducted an experiment in Bihar, India with 14,000 students to investigate whether classroom-based media and literacy trainings could increase students’ discernment and sharing of accurate health information. The trainings increased discernment of accurate health information by 35% and increased the willingness to share accurate health information by 27%. This post is part of our Mercury Project Findings series on Health Information Literacy Trainings.
Virtual Lecture | May 22, 2:00 PM Eastern, via Zoom
Researchers often pursue ideas because they are novel and innovative. Breaking new ground is clearly important, and being “first” can help a paper get published. But the drive to be new can also push researchers away from the kinds of iterative research questions that help decision-makers implement effective policy (and towards surprising results that can be hard to replicate). This talk will tell the story of a policy-research partnership that started with a new and surprising finding—that summer jobs programs don’t actually help future youth employment, but do reduce violence—then kept iterating to explore how, why, and for whom. The result highlights what can come from repeated evaluation: an evidence base that is more convincing, illuminating, and practical than any single study can be.
The Social Science Research Council welcomes American University and Stony Brook University to the College and University Fund for the Social Sciences, joining more than 50 North American institutions of higher education (and more than 90 campuses) dedicated to connecting across disciplines and institutions to support impactful social and behavioral science that produces new knowledge and advances the common good.
The AI Disclosures Project today released findings from a new working paper, “Beyond Public Access in LLM Pre-Training Data: Non-public book content in OpenAI’s Models,” investigating the use of non-public, copyrighted content in LLM model training. The research team used the DE-COP membership inference attack method to analyze 34 copyrighted O’Reilly Media books to assess whether OpenAI’s models were trained on content that required payment or authorization to access.
A Mercury Project team examined whether SMS-based interventions that are backed by behavioral research insights and aimed at increasing Covid-19 booster rates translate to real-world outcomes.
This work was recently published in Nature Human Behaviour and is part of our Mercury Project Findings series on SMS-based Interventions.
A Mercury Project team conducted a mega-study to assess the effects of offering a free ride to vaccination sites and SMS reminders on vaccine booster uptake rates, targeting over 3 million CVS Pharmacy patients with texts crafted by an interdisciplinary team of behavioral scientists, including economists, psychologists, and physicians.
This work was recently published in Nature and is part of our Mercury Project Findings series on SMS-based Interventions.
