2020s: Pandemic Response
The Covid-19 pandemic that spread quickly around the globe in 2020 revealed the importance of social and behavioral science aimed at finding interventions that increase vaccination uptake.
2020s:
Pandemic Response
In November 2021, the Social Science Research Council launched the Mercury Project, a three-year $25 million research consortium to support the development and testing of interventions to increase Covid-19 vaccination demand in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the United States.
In the 1990s the Social Science Research Council established a research committee on Global Environmental Change to study the “long-term, large-scale interfaces of humanity, technology, and the global environment.”
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The Mercury Project was seeded by $10.25 million in support from the Rockefeller, Robert Wood Johnson, Craig Newmark, and Alfred P. Sloan Foundations. In 2022, the National Science Foundation provided $12.5 million in co-funding support for the Mercury Project, and the Bill & Melinda Gates and Alfred P. Sloan foundations contributed an additional $2.25 million in support for the initiative.
The first Mercury Project cohort of grantees, announced in August 2022, includes 90 researchers located in 22 countries around the globe, working in 12 teams to conduct rigorous evaluations of multiple interventions to boost vaccination demand in 17 countries.
The consortium’s research framework summarizes the portfolio of interventions being evaluated, including those that reduce the search costs of finding vaccine information, reduce the decision costs of assessing the accuracy of multiple sources of vaccine information, reduce the logistical costs of acquiring a vaccination, and increase the social benefits from vaccination.
The Mercury Project aims to contribute to social and behavioral science on cost-effective and scalable interventions to increase vaccination demand.
SMS-based messages from a US-based health provider increased two-dose Covid vaccination take-up at a cost of only $2.50 per full vaccination.
Encouraging parents to signal their children’s vaccinated status with colorful bracelets increased complete vaccinations by 14 percentage points in Sierra Leone at a cost of only $1 per child.
Exposing survey respondents to information about widespread Covid-19 vaccine acceptance among their peers and neighbors increased vaccine confidence in 23 countries.
A 680,000-person US-based megastudy of 22 SMS-based interventions found that framing vaccination appointments as assets to be lost increased flu vaccination rates by 10 percent at very low cost.
Vaccination queue in Harare, Zimbabwe
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The Next 100 Years
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Social and behavioral science
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The Social Science Research Council, a nonpartisan nonprofit founded in 1923 by seven professional associations in the social and behavioral sciences, mobilizes policy-relevant social and behavioral science for the public good.