Visual policy narrative messaging improves COVID-19 vaccine uptake.

In the face of vaccine hesitancy, public health officials are seeking more effective risk communication approaches to increase vaccination rates. We test the influence of visual policy narratives on COVID-19 vaccination behavior through a panel survey experiment conducted in early 2021 (n = 3,900) and then 8 weeks later (n = 2,268). We examine the effects of three visual policy narrative messages that test the narrative mechanism of character selection (yourself, your circle, and your community) and a nonnarrative control on COVID-19 vaccine behavior. Visual risk messages that use narratives positively influence COVID-19 vaccination through serial mediation of affective response to the messages and motivation to get the COVID-19 vaccination. Additionally, character selection matters, as messages focusing on protecting others (i.e. your circle and your community) perform stronger than those of yourself. Political ideology moderated some of the effects, with conservative respondents in the nonnarrative control condition having a higher probability of vaccination in comparison to the protect yourself condition. Taken together, these results suggest that public health officials should use narrative-based visual communication messages that emphasize communal benefits of vaccinations.

Can Common Pool Resource Theory Catalyze Stakeholder-Driven Solutions to the Freshwater Salinization Syndrome?

Freshwater salinity is rising across many regions of the United States as well as globally, a phenomenon called the freshwater salinization syndrome (FSS). The FSS mobilizes organic carbon, nutrients, heavy metals, and other contaminants sequestered in soils and freshwater sediments, alters the structures and functions of soils, streams, and riparian ecosystems, threatens drinking water supplies, and undermines progress toward many of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. There is an urgent need to leverage the current understanding of salinization's causes and consequences─in partnership with engineers, social scientists, policymakers, and other stakeholders─into locally tailored approaches for balancing our nation's salt budget. In this feature, we propose that the FSS can be understood as a common pool resource problem and explore Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom's social-ecological systems framework as an approach for identifying the conditions under which local actors may work collectively to manage the FSS in the absence of top-down regulatory controls. We adopt as a case study rising sodium concentrations in the Occoquan Reservoir, a critical water supply for up to one million residents in Northern Virginia (USA), to illustrate emerging impacts, underlying causes, possible solutions, and critical research needs.

Toward a rational and ethical sociotechnical system of autonomous vehicles: A novel application of multi-criteria decision analysis.

The impacts of autonomous vehicles (AV) are widely anticipated to be socially, economically, and ethically significant. A reliable assessment of the harms and benefits of their large-scale deployment requires a multi-disciplinary approach. To that end, we employed Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis to make such an assessment. We obtained opinions from 19 disciplinary experts to assess the significance of 13 potential harms and eight potential benefits that might arise under four deployments schemes. Specifically, we considered: (1) the status quo, i.e., no AVs are deployed; (2) unfettered assimilation, i.e., no regulatory control would be exercised and commercial entities would "push" the development and deployment; (3) regulated introduction, i.e., regulatory control would be applied and either private individuals or commercial fleet operators could own the AVs; and (4) fleets only, i.e., regulatory control would be applied and only commercial fleet operators could own the AVs. Our results suggest that two of these scenarios, (3) and (4), namely regulated privately-owned introduction or fleet ownership or autonomous vehicles would be less likely to cause harm than either the status quo or the unfettered options.

Clinicians, cooks, and cashiers: Examining health equity and the COVID-19 risks to essential workers.

In Spring/Summer 2020, most individuals living in the United States experienced several months of social distancing and stay-at-home orders because of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Clinicians, restaurant cooks, cashiers, transit operators, and other essential workers (EWs), however, continued to work outside the home during this time in order to keep others alive and maintain a functioning society. In the United States, EWs are often low-income persons of color who are more likely to face socioeconomic vulnerabilities, systemic racism, and health inequities. To assess the various impacts of COVID-19 on EWs, an online survey was distributed to a representative sample of individuals residing in six states during May/June 2020. The sample included 990 individuals who identified as EWs and 736 nonessential workers (NWs). We assessed differences between EW and NW respondents according to three categories related to health equity and social determinants of health: (1) demographics (e.g. race/ethnicity); (2) COVID-19 exposure risk pathways (e.g. ability to social distance); and (3) COVID-19 risk perceptions (e.g. perceived risk of contracting COVID-19). EWs were more likely to be Black or Hispanic than NWs and also had lower incomes and education levels on average. Unsurprisingly, EWs were substantially more likely to report working outside the home and less likely to report social distancing and wearing masks indoors as compared to NWs. EWs also perceived a slightly greater risk of contracting COVID-19. These findings, which we discuss in the context of persistent structural inequalities, systemic racism, and health inequities within the United States, highlight ways in which COVID-19 exacerbates existing socioeconomic vulnerabilities faced by EWs.