Science Café with Lukáš Tóth

On 2 April 2020, the Czech Liaison Office for Research, Development and Innovation (CZELO), together with the Czech Centre Brussels, and regional representation of South Moravia, jointly organised another Science Café. This time, Lukáš Tóth accepted the invitation for the seventeenth edition. Due to the COVID-19 crisis, Science Café took place online.

Lukáš Tóth is an economist and co-founder of the research company Behavio Labs. His specialisations are behavioural experiments and market regulation. He regularly writes economics columns for the news media and has co-authored part of the internationally bestselling book Economics of Good and Evil. He has been a visiting researcher in the USA and UK. His Alma Mater
is the Charles University and his current affiliation is the University of Amsterdam.

The debate focused on information flows in the times of COVID-19 crisis, public perception and procession of information. Mr Tóth spoke about the effects, created by the tension between the lack of key information and overwhelming amount of COVID19-related fake news. The pandemics raises i.a. the demand for science, activates unprecedented government approval ratings, and increases inequality and information asymmetry between social groups. Furthermore, Lukáš Tóth presented the results of the Government Crisis Communication experiment, on which he collaborated. The experiment showed what types of government communication works best and came up with few recommendations on how to promote compliance, such as reminders, which greatly increase compliance, even if the public was already informed. According to the results, non-violent social norms should be preferred (e.g. wearing mouth-mask by celebrities), whereas threats could create overreaction by the population. Public trust is paramount for the governments in the times of crisis and they should prioritize and simplify the information, keep central depository of information and do not enforce details.
Questions from the audience were directed on methods of battling misinformation. Participants were also interested in microtargeting and how to optimize and prioritize public information in a fragmented media space.