BIO
Dolores Albarracín (La Plata, Argentina) is the Alexandra Heyman Nash University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her BA in Psychology from the Catholic University of La Plata (Argentina) and her PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of Belgrano (Argentina) and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (United States). From 1997 to 2007 she was a professor at the University of Florida, before taking up a faculty appointment at the University of Illinois. In 2012, she moved to the University of Pennsylvania where she currently heads the Social Action Lab and the Health and Social Media Group at the Annenberg School for Communication.
Author of over 170 articles and book chapters in the field of psychology and health, her two latest books are Creating Conspiracy Beliefs: How Our Thoughts Are Shaped and Action and Inaction in a Social World: Predicting and Changing Attitudes and Behavior. Albarracín has served as editor of Psychological Bulletin and numbers among her various distinctions the 2020 Carol and Ed Diener Award in Social Psychology from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology and the 2019 Avant Garde Award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
CONTRIBUTION
Strategies to deal with disinformation and conspiracy theories
The research done by Dolores Albarracín, Alexandra Heyman Nash University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, “has increased our understanding of how attitudes can be changed, particularly with regard to persuasive messages,” in the words of the award committee.
Martin Fishbein recruited her to be his PhD student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In 2007 she and Ajzen published Prediction and Change of Health Behavior: Applying the Reasoned Action Approach.
The applied nature of her research is evident in a good number of her published works. These include 2021’s Action and Inaction in a Social World: Prediction and Change of Attitudes and Behaviors, where she shows that appeals to action are more effective than those encouraging inaction when the goal is to achieve a given behavior, and that when a recipient lacks time to analyze a persuasive message, it will be the emotional factor that determines their attitude and behavior.
In 2022 she was among the co-authors of Creating Conspiracy Beliefs: How Our Thoughts Are Shaped, examining ways to discredit disinformation and conspiracy theories. On the latter she has this to say: “In the past conspiracy theories were studied as a function of individual personality, but social psychology has shown that when a belief is taken up by large groups it becomes a problem of social influence.” A society facing more uncertainty is, she reasons, more susceptible to conspiratorial messages, which spread through both interpersonal relationships and other media: “The intentionality of messages of this kind is easier to expose when there is a chance to cross-check and refute them, yet, even so, they are maintained. This happens in the media when the duty to inform is replaced by the desire to indoctrinate; when what they put out has the appearance of news, but is really disinformation.”
For Albarracín, “attitude theory can help us predict the kind of disinformation we have to deal with most urgently. For instance, believing the Earth is flat has no direct impact on a person’s conduct, but believing vaccines are harmful can dissuade someone from getting a jab, with consequences for their own health and public health in general. What the evidence is telling us is that since we can’t stem the whole tide of disinformation, the best strategy is to intervene where it has a direct negative effect.” As to how to intervene, the obvious course is not always the wisest. “Attempting to argue down the misguided belief is just not effective. It’s better to opt for a ‘bypass’ and try to replace that belief by one that holds up, arguing let’s say for the benefits of vaccines or transgenic foods.”
Much of Albarracín’s research has had health implications and her experimental work has been a key input to public health strategies to prevent risk behaviors that bear in mind environmental influence. For nearly two decades, she has received funding from the National Institutes of Health to apply her theoretical findings to the fight against disease in the areas of HIV, smoking and lifestyle change. Examining AIDS prevention campaigns, she concluded that persuasive messages increased people’s knowledge about HIV, but did not lead to behavioral change. Her studies have also found that although fear-based messaging is more effective, a better course is to try to dissuade people from risk behaviors while promoting healthier options.
