BSPA honors COVID paper written by MIT Sloan faculty and researchers
Ziv Epstein (postdoctoral associate; MIT Media Arts and Sciences PhD ’23), Jackson G. Lu (General Motors Professor of Management and professor of Work and Organization Studies), David G. Rand (visiting professor of Marketing; Cornell University), and Michael Stagnaro (research scientist) have won the 2026 Best Publication Award for Innovation in Behavioral Policy from the Behavioral Science & Policy Association (BSPA).
This year’s award recognizes research published 2022-2025 “that advances the rigorous application and development of behavioral/social science to policy and practice in public, private and nonprofit sectors … to encourage work that has potential to improve the quality of life of individuals and/or organizations.”
Their winning paper, titled “Understanding and Combatting Misinformation Across 16 Countries on Six Continents” (Nature Human Behaviour 7, 1502-1513, 2023), is co-authored with Antonio Arechar (CIDE—Center for Research and Teaching in Economics, Mexico), Jennifer Allen (New York University Stern; MIT Sloan Marketing PhD ’24), Adam Berinsky (MIT Political Science), Rocky Cole (iVerify), Kiran Garimella (Rutgers), Andrew Gully (Microsoft), Gordon Pennycook (Cornell University), Robert M. Ross (Macquarie University), and Yunhao (Jerry) Zhang (Psychology of Technology Institute; MIT Sloan PhD ’23).
The paper focuses on misinformation about COVID-19, with nearly 35,000 participants in global experiments that validate major findings from previous work focused on the U.S. factors that predict susceptibility to misinformation, as well as effectiveness of interventions to help, are found to be similar across the world. A Cornell news article has more information.
The award was announced Cambridge at the BSPA 2026 Conference in June.