Understanding the dynamics emerging from infodemics: a call to action for interdisciplinary research

Stephan Leitner1, Bartosz Gula2, Dietmar Jannach3, Ulrike Krieg-Holz4, Friederike Wall1
1Department of Management Control and Strategic Management, University of Klagenfurt, Klagenfurt, Austria
2Cognitive Psychology Unit, University of Klagenfurt, Klagenfurt, Austria
3Department of Applied Informatics, University of Klagenfurt, Klagenfurt, Austria
4Department of German Studies, University of Klagenfurt, Klagenfurt, Austria

Tóm tắt

Abstract

Research on infodemics, i.e., the rapid spread of (mis)information related to a hazardous event, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, requires integrating a multiplicity of scientific disciplines. The dynamics emerging from infodemics have the potential to generate complex behavioral patterns. To react appropriately, it is of ultimate importance for the fields of Business and Economics to understand these dynamics. In the short run, they might lead to an adaptation in household spending or to a shift in buying behavior towards online providers. In the long run, changes in investments, consumer behavior, and markets are to be expected. We argue that the dynamics emerge from complex interactions among multiple factors, such as information and misinformation accessible to individuals and the formation and revision of beliefs. (Mis)information accessible to individuals is, amongst others, affected by algorithms specifically designed to provide personalized information, while automated fact-checking algorithms can help reduce the amount of circulating misinformation. The formation and revision of individual (and probably false) beliefs and individual fact-checking and interpretation of information are heavily affected by linguistic patterns inherent to information during pandemics and infodemics and further factors, such as affect, intuition, and motives. We argue that, to get a deep(er) understanding of the dynamics emerging from infodemics, the fields of Business and Economics should integrate the perspectives of Computer Science and Information Systems, (Computational) Linguistics, and Cognitive Science into the wider context of economic systems (e.g., organizations, markets or industries) and propose a way to do so. As research on infodemics is a strongly interdisciplinary field and the integration of the above-mentioned disciplines is a first step towards a holistic approach, we conclude with a call to action which should encourage researchers to collaborate across scientific disciplines and unfold collective creativity, which will substantially advance research on infodemics.

Từ khóa


Tài liệu tham khảo

Abdollahpouri H, Adomavicius G, Burke R et al (2020) Multistakeholder recommendation: survey and research directions. User Model User-adapt Interact 30:127–158

Adam D (2020) Modelling the pandemic: the simulations driving the world’s response to COVID-19. Nature 580:316–318

Addo PC, Jiaming F, Kulbo NB, Liangqiang L (2020) COVID-19: fear appeal favoring purchase behavior towards personal protective equipment. Serv Ind J 40:471–490

Ahmad AR, Murad HR (2020) The impact of social media on panic during the COVID-19 pandemic in Iraqi Kurdistan: online questionnaire study. J Med Internet Res 22:e19556

Augenstein I, Lioma C, Wang D, et al (2019) MultiFC: a real-world multi-domain dataset for evidence-based fact checking of claims. In: EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019: proceedings of the 2019 conference on empirical methods in natural language processing and 9th international joint conference on natural language processing. Hong Kong, China, 4685–4697

Baker SR, Bloom N, Davis SJ, Terry SJ (2020) Covid-induced economic uncertainty. NBER Work Pap No 26983:1–16

Baker P, Rogers K, Enrich D, Haberman M (2020a) Trump’s aggressive advocacy of malaria drug for treating coronavirus divides medical community. New York Times 2020 Apr 6. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/06/us/politics/coronavirus-trump-malaria-drug.html. Accessed 1 Jun 2020

Baker SR, Farrokhnia RA, Meyer S et al (2020c) How does household spending respond to an epidemic? consumption during the 2020 covid-19 pandemic. Review Asset Pricing Stud 10(4):834–862

Baldassari D (2009) Collective action. In: Bearman P, Hedström P (eds) The oxforc handbook of analytical sociology, pp 316–332

Barrón-Cedeño A, Elsayed T, Nakov PI, et al (2020) CheckThat! at CLEF 2020: enabling the automatic identification and verification of claims in social media. In: advances in information retrieval. ECIR 2020: proceedings of the 42nd European conference on information retrieval research. Springer, Lisbon, Portugal 499–507

Bauminger-Zviely N (2013) False-Belief Task. In: Volkmar FR (ed) Encyclopedia of autism spectrum disorders. Springer, New York, New York, NY, p 1249

Bernstein DM, Laney C, Morris EK, Loftus EF (2005) False memories about food can lead to food avoidance. Soc Cogn 23:11–34

Bond CF, DePaulo BM (2006) Accuracy of deception judgments. Personal Soc Psychol Rev 10:214–234

Burgoon JK, Blair JP, Qin T, Nunamaker Jr. JF (2003) Detecting deception through linguistic analysis. In: intelligence and security informatics. ISI 2003: proceedings of the 1st NSF/NIJ symposium on intelligence and security informatics. Springer, Tucson, Arizona 91–101

Burke R (2017) Multisided fairness for recommendation. arXiv Prepr arXiv170700093

Cabrio E, Villata S (2012) Combining textual entailment and argumentation theory for supporting online debates interactions. In: ACL 2012: proceedings of the 50th annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics. Jeju Island, Korea 208–212

Caminada M (2018) Rationality postulates: applying argumentation theory for non-monotonic reasoning. In: Baroni P, Gabbay D, Giacomin M, van der Torre L (eds) Handbook of formal argumentation, College Publications, pp 771–795

Celis LE, Kapoor S, Salehi F, Vishnoi N (2019) Controlling polarization in personalization: an algorithmic framework. In: proceedings of the conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency 160–169

Chaudhary H (2020) Analyzing the paradigm shift of consumer behavior towards E-Commerce during pandemic lockdown. Available SSRN 3664668

Cinelli M, Quattrociocchi W, Galeazzi A, et al (2020) The covid-19 social media infodemic. arXiv Prepr arXiv200305004

De Villiers JG, Pyers JE (2002) Complements to cognition: a longitudinal study of the relationship between complex syntax and false-belief-understanding. Cogn Dev 17:1037–1060

Deci EL, Ryan RM (2000) The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychol Inq 11:227–268

Donthu N, Gustafsson A (2020) Effects of COVID-19 on business and research. J Bus Res 117:284

Dryhurst S, Schneider CR, Kerr J et al (2020) Risk perceptions of COVID-19 around the world. J Risk Res. https://doi.org/10.1080/13669877.2020.1758193

Evans JSBT, Stanovich KE (2013) Dual-process theories of higher cognition: advancing the debate. Perspect Psychol Sci 8:223–241

Eysenbach G (2002) Infodemiology: the epidemiology of (mis) information. Am J Med 113:763–765

Eysenbach G (2020) How to fight an infodemic: the four pillars of infodemic management. J Med Internet Res 22:e21820

Farrar MJ, Maag L (2002) Early language development and the emergence of a theory of mind. First Lang 22:197–213

Farrar MJ, Lee H, Cho Y-H et al (2013) Language and false belief in Korean-speaking and English-speaking children. Cogn Dev 28:209–221

Fernandes N (2020) Economic effects of coronavirus outbreak (COVID-19) on the world economy. Available SSRN 3557504

Fitzpatrick E, Bachenko J (2019) Building a forensic corpus to test language-based indicators of deception. Lang Comput 71:183–196

Fitzpatrick E, Bachenko J, Fornaciari T (2015) Automatic detection of verbal deception. Synth Lect Human Lang Technol 8(3):1–119

Fleder D, Hosanagar K (2009) Blockbuster culture’s next rise or fall: the impact of recommender systems on sales diversity. Manage Sci 55:697–712

Friedler SA, Scheidegger C, Venkatasubramanian S (2016) On the (im)possibility of fairness. arXiv Prepr arXiv160907236

Funk S, Gilad E, Watkins C, Jansen VAA (2009) The spread of awareness and its impact on epidemic outbreaks. Proc Natl Acad Sci 106:6872–6877

Gärdenfors P (1992) Belief revision: an introduction. In: Belief Revision. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 1–28

Geraerts E, Bernstein DM, Merckelbach H et al (2008) Lasting false beliefs and their behavioral consequences. Psychol Sci 19:749–753

Gigerenzer G (2004) Dread risk, September 11, and fatal traffic accidents. Psychol Sci 15:286–287

Gigerenzer G (2015) Risk savvy: how to make good decisions. Penguin Books, New York

Gillingham KT, Knittel CR, Li J et al (2020) The Short-run and Long-run effects of Covid-19 on energy and the environment. Joule 4:1337–1341

Goodell JW (2020) COVID-19 and finance: agendas for future research. Financ Res Lett 35:101512

Gröndahl T, Asokan N (2019) Text analysis in adversarial settings: Does deception leave a stylistic trace? ACM Comput Surv 52(3):1–36

Habernal I, Gurevych I (2017) Argumentation mining in user-generated web discourse. Comput Linguist 43:125–179

Hall MC, Prayag G, Fieger P, Dyason D (2020) Beyond panic buying: consumption displacement and COVID-19. J Serv Manag. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOSM-05-2020-0151

Hancock JT, Curry LE, Goorha S, Woodworth M (2007) On lying and being lied to: A linguistic analysis of deception in computer-mediated communication. Discourse Process 45:1–23

Hasher L, Goldstein D, Toppino T (1977) Frequency and the conference of referential validity. J Verbal Learning Verbal Behav 16:107–112

Hertwig R, Engel C (2016) Homo ignorans: Deliberately choosing not to know. Perspect Psychol Sci 11:359–372

Hidey C, Musi E, Hwang A, et al (2017) Analyzing the semantic types of claims and premises in an online persuasive forum. In: proceedings of the 4th workshop on argument mining 11–21

Ilyas U (2020) Infodemic vs pandemic: role of social media. Rawal Med J 45:500–501

Jannach D, Zanker M, Felfernig A, Friedrich G (2010) Recommender systems: an introduction. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

Jordà Ò, Singh SR, Taylor AM (2020) Longer-run economic consequences of pandemics. National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. 26934. http://www.nber.org/papers/w26934

Kahneman D (2003) A perspective on judgment and choice: mapping bounded rationality. Am Psychol 58:697–720

Karacapilidis N, Papadias D (1998) Hermes: Supporting argumentative discourse in multi agent decision making. In: AAAI-IAAI ’98: proceedings of the 15th national conference on artificial intelligence and 10th conference on innovative applications of artificial intelligence. AAAI/MIT Press, Madison, Wisconsin, USA 827–832

Kim L, Fast SM, Markuzon N (2019) Incorporating media data into a model of infectious disease transmission. PLoS ONE 14:e0197646

Kozyreva A, Lewandowsky S, Hertwig R (2019) Citizens versus the internet: Confronting digital challenges with cognitive tools. Prepr PsyArXiv

Laney C, Fowler NB, Nelson KJ et al (2008) The persistence of false beliefs. Acta Psychol (Amst) 129:190–197

Lee C, Welker RB, Odom MD (2009) Features of computer-mediated, text-based messages that support automatable, linguistics-based indicators for deception detection. J Inf Syst 23:5–24

Leitner S (2020) On the dynamics emerging from pandemics and infodemics. Mind Soc. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11299-020-00256-y

Leitner S, Wall F (2020) Decision-facilitating information in hidden-action setups: An agent-based approach. J Econ Interact Coord 1–38 (online first)

Lenzer J (2020) Covid-19: US gives emergency approval to hydroxychloroquine despite lack of evidence. BMJ 220 369:m1335. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m1335

Lerman K, Yan X, Wu X-Z (2016) The" majority illusion" in social networks. PLoS ONE 11:e0147617

Lewandowsky S, Ecker UKH, Seifert CM et al (2012) Misinformation and its correction: continued influence and successful debiasing. Psychol Sci Public Interes 13:106–131

Lippi M, Torroni P (2016) Argumentation mining: state of the art and emerging trends. ACM Trans Internet Technol 16(2):1–25

Liu Y, Wu Y-FB (2020) FNED: a deep network for fake news early detection on social media. ACM Trans Inf Syst 38(3):1–33

Loftus EF (2005) Planting misinformation in the human mind: a 30-year investigation of the malleability of memory. Learn Mem 12:361–366

Lorenz-Spreen P, Lewandowsky S, Sunstein CR, Hertwig R (2020) How behavioural sciences can promote truth, autonomy and democratic discourse online. Nat Hum Behav 4:1102–1109

Newman ML, Pennebaker JW, Berry DS, Richards JM (2003) Lying words: predicting deception from linguistic styles. Personal Soc Psychol Bull 29:665–675

Nicola M, Alsafi Z, Sohrabi C et al (2020) The socio-economic implications of the coronavirus and COVID-19 pandemic: a review. Int J Surg 78:185–193

Niiniluoto I (1977) On the truthlikeness of generalizations. In: Basic problems in methodology and linguistics. Springer, Dotrecht, pp 121–147

Niiniluoto I (2011) Revising beliefs towards the truth. Erkenntnis 75:165

Pariser E (2011) The filter bubble: what the internet is hiding from you. Penguin Press, United Kingdom

Parsons S, Sierra C, Jennings N (1998) Agents that reason and negotiate by arguing. J Log Comput 8:261–292

Popat K, Mukherjee S, Yates A, Weikum G (2018) DeClarE: Debunking fake news and false claims using evidence-aware deep learning. In: EMNLP 2018: proceedings of the 2018 conference on empirical methods in natural language processing. Brussels, Belgium 22–32

Pulido CM, Villarejo-Carballido B, Redondo-Sama G, Gómez A (2020) COVID-19 infodemic: more retweets for science-based information on coronavirus than for false information. Int Sociol 35(4):377–392

Rashkin H, Choi E, Jang JY, et al (2017) Truth of varying shades: Analyzing language in fake news and political fact-checking. In: EMNLP 2017: proceedings of the 2017 conference on empirical methods in natural language processing. Copenhagen, Denmark 2931–2937

Reinwald P, Leitner S, Wall F (2020) On heterogeneous memory in hidden-action setups: an agent-based approach. SIMUL 2020: The Twelfth International Conference in System Simulation, pp 37–41

Rovetta A, Bhagavathula AS (2020) Covid-19-related web search behaviors and infodemic attitudes in Italy: infodemiological study. JMIR public Heal Surveill 6:e19374

Shefrin H (2020) Some reflections about diverse responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Mind Soc. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11299-020-00247-z

Sheth J (2020) Impact of Covid-19 on Consumer Behavior: Will the Old Habits Return or Die? J Bus Res 117:280–283

Simon HA (1990) Invariants of human behavior. Annu Rev Psychol 41:1–20

Slade L, Ruffman T (2005) How language does (and does not) relate to theory of mind: a longitudinal study of syntax, semantics, working memory and false belief. Br J Dev Psychol 23:117–141

Slovic P (2010) The feeling of risk: new perspectives on risk perception. Routledge, New York

Squazzoni F, Polhill JG, Edmonds B et al (2020) Computational models that matter during a global pandemic outbreak: a call to action. J Artif Soc Soc Simul 23:1–10

Toulmin SE (1958) The uses of argument. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

Thorne J, Vlachos A (2018) Automated fact checking: Task formulations, methods and future directions. In: COLING 2018: proceedings of the 27th international conference on computational linguistics: main conference. Santa Fe, New Mexico, pp 3346–3359

Thurner S, Hanel R, Klimek P (2018) Introduction to the theory of complex systems. Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford

U.S. Food & Drug (2020) FDA cautions against use of hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine for COVID-19 outside the hospital setting or a clinical trial due to risk of heart rhythm problems. https://www.fda.gov/drugs/drug-safety-and-availability/fda-cautions-against-use-hydroxychloroquine-or-chloroquine-covid-19-outside-hospital-setting-or. Accessed 15 Jul 2020

Unkelbach C, Rom SC (2017) A referential theory of the repetition-induced truth effect. Cognition 160:110–126

Unkelbach C, Koch A, Cologne SCC (2019) Gullible but functional: Information repetition and the formation of beliefs. In: the social psychology of gullibility. Routledge, pp 42–60

Vaezi A, Javanmard SH (2020) Infodemic and risk communication in the era of CoV-19. Adv Biomed Res 9:10

Van Dyke N, Amos B (2017) Social movement coalitions: formation, longevity, and success. Sociol Compass 11:e12489

van Eemeren FH, Grootendorst R (2004) A systematic theory of argumentation: the pragma-dialectical approach. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

Verheij B (2009) The Toulmin argument model in artificial intelligence. In: argumentation in artificial intelligence. Springer, Boston, MA, pp 219–238

Volkova S, Shaffer K, Jang JY, Hodas N (2017) Separating facts from fiction: linguistic models to classify suspicious and trusted news posts on twitter. In: ACL 2017: proceedings of the 55th annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics. Vancouver, British Columbia, pp 647–653

Wall F (2019) Coordination with erroneous communication: results of an agent-based simulation. Knowl Inf Syst 61:161–195

Wineburg S, McGrew S (2019) Lateral reading and the nature of expertise: Reading less and learning more when evaluating digital information. Teach Coll Rec 121:1–40

World Health Organization (2018) Managing epidemics: key facts about major deadly diseases. World Health Organization, Geneva

Zannettou S, Sirivianos M, Blackburn J, Kourtellis N (2019) The web of false information: Rumors, fake news, hoaxes, clickbait, and various other shenanigans. J Data Inf Qual 11:1–37

Zarocostas J (2020) How to fight an infodemic. Lancet 395:676