Misinformation: The Global Listening Project
Professor of Anthropology, Risk and Decision Science
Director, The Vaccine Confidence Project
London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
In the context of increasing public questioning, heightened emotions, and swarms of misinformation online and offline, interactions between health care professionals and patients have become more challenging. Adding to that is time constraints for consultations, risking shortening the needed time to listen for cues of other issues that may need attention for successful health outcomes. The Global Listening Project was launched in 2021 in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, but lessons learned, and strategies developed are relevant to daily life in today’s health care settings.
Heidi J. Larson, PhD, is a Professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Founding Director of the Vaccine Confidence Project. Her work focuses on building trust in vaccines, managing risk in health technologies, and strengthening public cooperation during pandemics and global crises, informed by experience across academia and industry.
In 2021, Prof. Larson launched the Global Listening Project to investigate ecosystems of trust around health and information technologies, leading a 70-country study of public experiences and trust during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Prof. Larson served as the 2022 Merrimon Lecturer, presenting “Finding the Greater Good in an Era of Polarization: What Vaccine Hesitancy Has Taught Us.” Since her Merrimon talk in 2022, Prof. Larson and her research group have conducted focus groups and interviewed over 70,000 people in 70 countries to understand who people turned to and trusted, how they navigated health information and misinformation, and what mattered most to them to earn their trust in health care systems and interventions. These learnings have guided roundtables in multiple settings since the pandemic, listening for the scope and nature of challenges health care professionals face when addressing their patients as well as their own emotions.
You can watch the lecture here: bioethics.unc.edu/talk/merrimon-lecture-2022
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Disclaimer: The views expressed herein are those of the presenter, they do not necessarily reflect the views of the contracted organization, department, School of Medicine, nor the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.