Thread alert: There is a lot of back and forth about the use and abuse of behavioral and social science knowledge to help universities and colleges open up to in-person education, or not, in the time of COVID-19. 1/ @dynarski & @sTeamTraen

Being at a University ( @Illinois_Alma) that has, to my knowledge, created the most informed and comprehensive system to open safely, and being the director of our social and behavioral science unit ( @CSBS_Illinois) I have some thoughts I’d like to share. 2/

At the @CSBS_Illinois, we started curating social and behavioral science insights from day 1 in an attempt to provide information to our community. 3/

We posted information on how social and behavioral science knowledge could help. https://csbs.research.illinois.edu/news-events/social-and-behavioral-science-and-covid-19/
Conducted workshops: https://csbs.research.illinois.edu/understandingcontemporarychallenges/
Ran studies: https://csbs.research.illinois.edu/news-events/blog/
and wrote blogs: https://csbs.research.illinois.edu/2020/08/16/what-we-know-about-college-students-to-help-manage-covid-19/
4/

While I feel like my university has afforded the @CSBS_Illinois the chance to inform the process, for which I am grateful, for the most part, our efforts have not been systematically incorporated into the pandemic planning. I see at least two reasons for that, IMHO. 5/

First, front line social and behavioral science researchers have seldom helped the units that were charged with the day-to-day activities of undergraduates, like the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs office. 6/

The only reasons for us to work with student affairs in the past was to plead with them to selfishly use their data or gain access to the students so we could collect our own data. 7/

Over time, the student affairs people, given our myopic focus on our own research needs, appropriately began to rely on other social scientists, but not the ones employed as researchers at their own university (maybe we can do things differently going forward...) 8/

The second reason for our lack of influence is well-worn preference for biological and technical answers to our pandemic problems--the old bias toward the hard sciences issue. While I could complain about this bias, I won’t. Why? 9/

Partially, it is because we don’t have much usable knowledge to provide.

I know that undergrads are more impulsive and anxious than older populations, but I don’t know how that translates into something useful like the % of students will shirk our requests to comply. 10/

Knowing the compliance % would be rather useful to the modelers right now, but that is applied research. Having hard science envy, we over value “basic science” which is designed to be as useless as possible for applied issues like these. (maybe we can change that too) 11/

So, until we start providing data that can help in applied settings, like the one we are facing, I think we should refrain from saying that we should be heard or have more influence. We need to have something to say of value first. 12/

Relatedly, many folks, like @dynarski, are appropriately taking universities to task for expecting 19-year olds to get on the COVID-19 behavioral bandwagon and toe the self-control line. HT @sTeamTraen 13/

The two dominant approaches taken by universities to the need for self-control have been magical thinking or punishment. Interestingly, both magical thinking and punishment do reflect established social and behavioral science paradigms. 14/

The idea that college students would miraculously and immediately overcome their well known propensities to be a bit more cavalier than their older patrons is the hallmark of situationism. 15/

Situationism assumes that the overriding cause of human behavior is the incentives in any given situation. Change the situation, change the behavior. There is no need to consider prior standing on any attribute or population characteristics. 16/

The futility of a situationist position is no better demonstrated by the repeated cycle happening at universities where administrators wish their undergrad would simply behave differently and they don’t. I mean how much more of a strong situation do you need than a pandemic? 17/

Punishment--threatening expulsion and the like--is simple behaviorism. Of course, it is only the stick part of behaviorism. While adding in some carrots would not hurt, I am hard pressed to identify any proactive incentive structure that would magically fix the situation. 18/

Pay students not to party? Gift cards for wearing masks? TikTok threads supporting social distancing? They probably wouldn't hurt, but they are not magic bullets. 19/

The efforts so far have focused on individuals changing their own behavior. While that is 1 solution, another “social science” solution is to create conditions where the individual differences don’t matter. This idea does not seem to be considered as much as one would hope. 20/

In the case of @Illinois_Alma, our ability and motivation to test twice a week is a great example of creating conditions where individual differences will hopefully not matter enough to close us down. 21/

Combining constant testing with comprehensive exposure notification, mask use, and curtailing large gatherings, there is hope that we can keep the outbreaks, which will happen, to a minimum (thanks South Korea and other countries for showing us how it is done, btw). 22/

Of course, our plans may still go to hell in a hand basket. From the @CSBS_Illinois vantage point, behavioral and social science could be critical to the situation, but we may need to shift our priorities and consider other perspectives in order to wield more influence 23/