This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Carolyn Parkinson at the University of California, Los Angeles, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist studying the psychological drivers of information sharing. The current online media landscape affords unprecedented opportunities for messages to spread and reach large audiences, with the potential to influence the opinions and behavior of many. This phenomenon has particularly important implications in the study of effective messaging, given that exposure is critical to the success of public messaging campaigns, and interpersonal sharing is one cost-effective way to achieve exposure. Understanding the psychological motivations behind interpersonal sharing serves to advance predictive models of individual and population level sharing behavior while also providing basic science insights on the fundamental motivations behind a ubiquitous human behavior. The purpose of this postdoctoral fellowship is to investigate the psychological mechanisms that lead to increased interpersonal sharing of dynamic, naturalistic messages promoting safe driving.
Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), this project will examine the extent to which additional variance in sharing behavior of naturalistic messages can be accounted for by neural similarity across participants as messages unfold over time, thus providing information that is inaccessible to existing behavioral methods and extending prior neural research that used time-averaged brain activity during exposure to short texts. This project builds upon prior research in social neuroscience that shows that the similarity of individuals' neural responses to dynamic stimuli can predict population-level behavioral outcomes in other messaging contexts. This project further investigates the psychological interpretation of neural similarity by examining whether neural similarity in a priori defined brain regions is associated with behavioral similarity (as measured through engagement ratings and analysis of naturalistic text descriptions of the stimuli), which in turn leads to in- and out-of-sample sharing behavior. This project will provide basic science insight about the mechanisms that lead to increased interpersonal sharing, a ubiquitous human behavior.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
