About 75 percent of the users who’d transmitted false stories were conservatives, according to an analysis by the researchers, in keeping with a 2019 Northeastern University study that found conservatives are more likely than liberals to share fake news online.

Watching the uprising after Floyd’s death crystallized the parallels with the civil rights movement, said Margaret Burnham, a professor of law and Northeastern University’s Civil Rights and Restorative Project director. “What Jimmie Lee Jackson’s death did was it galvanized and catapulted an already organized national community around civil rights to come out and say no […]

In the long term, this feedback cycle can be very damaging to one’s mental health, warns Rachel Rodgers, a psychology professor at Northeastern University who’s studying the harms associated with digitally altered photos. “If you’re constantly being told that your outward appearance is a reflection of your inner self-worth, then when you’re posting something to […]

Brown’s actions did not deserve to be met with deadly force, said Stephanie Hartung, a Northeastern University law professor with an expertise on state and federal criminal procedure. She emphasized that Brown was not charged with a violent crime.

Sean Gallagher, an executive professor of education policy at Northeastern University and founder of Northeastern’s Center for the Future of Higher Education and Talent Strategy, agrees: “This looks to be a catalytic moment. Like what’s happened with the rapid digitization of so many other areas of our daily lives, we’ve probably gained in a few […]

“Emotions don’t just ‘happen’ to you,” said Lisa Feldman Barrett, a distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University and chief science officer for the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior at Harvard University. “They are made by you. Or more specifically, they’re made by your brain while it’s in constant conversation with your body and […]

“Reform can’t just be a small phrase in a large symphony — reform is the symphony,” said Jack Greene, a professor emeritus of criminology at Northeastern University. “And it’s going to require a lot of input from a lot of stakeholders. It’s not something you pull off the shelf and say, ‘Here we go.’ ”

“We don’t even agree on what ground truth is,” said David DeSteno, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University in Boston, who said that the lack of shared information sources in partisan politics makes building trust particularly difficult. Without a common understanding of the risk of getting seriously sick from the virus, or any side […]

Samuel Scarpino runs the Emergent Epidemics Lab at Northeastern University. For example, he says computer models often drastically oversimplify the way people interact with each other.

Jack Dennerlein, a professor at Northeastern University whose research has focused on musculoskeletal disorders, said introducing educational tools in workplaces is often not enough to substantially reduce injuries. Generally, he said, measures that provide mechanical lifts or reconfigure how a workplace is organized have a bigger impact. “It should be fitting the job to the […]

“It’s up to the journal and the scientists who (peer) review for the journals to start holding people accountable and say this doesn’t deserve to be a high profile paper because it only studied males. It can’t be that impactful if we don’t know the answer to the science question in females,” said Rebecca Shansky, […]