Reconfiguring behavioral science for crisis knowledge management

We are creating the infrastructure necessary for rapid crisis knowledge management

Topics

Our goals are to facilitate:

Knowledge creation

The crisis demands rapid responding, but “fast” is at odds with many of the things that make good science. What we need to be looking for is parts of the process that we can trim without cutting unduly into quality: we need a model of proper science without the drag.

Knowledge integration

We need to avoid needlessly reinventing wheels, we need meta-analyses, and we need to manage the likely flood of new research. This means a degree of synthesis that goes well beyond the slightly haphazard publication of reviews in normal science.

Knowledge dissemination

Developing new tools for knowledge aggregation will help disseminate knowledge, certainly to other researchers. But the nature of the crisis will mean that at least some of this knowledge must be disseminated to policy makers, journalists, or the wider public.

Managing consensus and disagreement

We must learn how to build consensus, shelving theoretical debates that are important to us in “normal science”, but that have little consequence for current action. There will be contexts where legitimate disagreements remain. These cannot be glossed over and should be made known to policymakers.

Tools

Putting reconfiguration into action

@SciBeh twitter account

On our Twitter account we post stuff. Please liberally mention us using @SciBeh whenever you want to draw our attention to something.

Ask the behavioral science community a question on subreddit r/BehSciAsk

For researchers, policy makers, and journalists: Ask the behavioral science community a question on research relevant to the COVID–19 crisis.

Discuss research on subreddit r/BehSciResearch

Discuss research from the behavioral sciences (COVID-19 related or more general; e.g., research ideas, experiment designs, discussion of preprints, evaluation of published work, information on past work and discussions of its relevance now, moving from research to policy, and methods and tools).

Discuss how we do research on subreddit r/BehSciMeta

Discuss how we as a behavioral science community should adapt how we do science for an effective COVID–19 response.

Growing knowledge base

Using hypothes.is, we are annotating a growing knowledge base where you can find a wide range of items ranging from tweets, newspaper and blog articles, reports to preprints and peer-reviewed articles. Please liberally mention us on twitter using @SciBeh whenever you want to draw our attention to something that could be made part of this knowledge base. To learn more, please see here.

Knowledge base

Learn more about our eclectic knowledge base

Link to the knowledge base

https://hypothes.is/groups/Jk8bYJdN/behsci

A short video on how to use the knowledge base

Overview of the ecosystem of information feeding the knowledge base

Overview of the ecosystem of information feeding the knowledge base. This will and should evolve over time.

Herzog, S. M. (2020, May 21). Boosting COVID-19 related behavioral science by feeding and consulting an eclectic knowledge base. Psychonomic Society blog.

Who is annotating all this?

Thanks a lot to our awesome annotators!

in alphabetic order:

Dampf, Ethan
Dvorak, Tadeas
El-Halaby, Gail
Glaubig, Lea
Ioakeimedou, Danae
Saxena, Gaurav
Spencer, Grace
Stuchly, Erik
Taylor, Katie
Wulf, Marlene Sophie
Ye, Siyan
Yesilada, Muhsin

annotator list last updated: 2020-07-29

Preprint detailing ideas and discussion points

“Crisis knowledge management: Reconfiguring the behavioural science community for rapid responding in the COVID–19 crisis”

Hahn, U., Lagnado, D., Lewandowsky, S., & Chater, N. (2020, March 21). Crisis knowledge management: Reconfiguring the behavioural science community for rapid responding in the COVID–19 crisis. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/hsxdk

The present crisis demands an all-out response if it is to be mastered with minimal damage. This means we, as the behavioural science community, need to think about how we can adapt to best support evidence-based policy in a rapidly changing, high-stakes environment. This piece is an attempt to initiate this process. The ‘recommendations’ made are first stabs that will hopefully be critiqued, debated and improved.

Blog Posts

Blog posts on our initiative

Contributors

The people contributing to the SciBeh initiative