
HIPE Lab
Providing insights to promote information that supports people's well-being and critical decision-making.
The HIPETM framework is an evidence-based innovation for building a resilient global information environment that includes increasing digital and information literacy in specific populations and providing insights to promote information that supports people's well-being and critical decision-making.
HIPE combines the power of social listening with health communication science. The Lab leverages machine learning and automated techniques combined with expert analysis to identify trends emerging on social media that have the potential to impact personal decisions and public safety.
HIPE enables collaboration and demonstration for MITRE and external partners to explore trends in online information impacting individual behavior, decision-making, and public health and safety to create actionable insights at the local level. The HIPE Lab applies human-centered design principles to address both immediate, person-centric action as well as to build resiliency and evidence-based, scalable solutions for the healthy information environment of the future.
Did you know an average American consumes about 34 gigabytes of data each day?
According to the University of California this is an increase of over 350 percent over the past decades.
That means if you were to take a three-by-five-inch index card and then spread them out side by side just your share of this information would cover every square inch of Massachusetts and Connecticut combined.
That is a lot of information. our brains are just not built to process that much information. Our mental filters are literally on overdrive.
There's a limit to the traffic of information we can pay conscious attention to at any one time, so we build cognitive shortcuts and only allow certain information in.
On top of the everyday information that our brain has to process there's been a steady increase in miss and disinformation on social media so it's only logical that some of that information, especially the ones that triggers our interest and is persuasive, would make it past our mental filters.
The world health organization has called this flood of information an “infodemic.”
An infodemic occurs when there is too much information that includes miss and disinformation during a disease outbreak.
What is mis- and disinformation? Misinformation is false or inaccurate information that is spread in an unintentional way. Whereas disinformation also contains false or inaccurate information that is spread with an intent to deceive.
Both mis- and disinformation make it confusing for people to make good decisions about their health and the health of those around them and can negatively impact health outcomes in a population.
What can we do about it? MITRE developed the Health Information Persuasion Lab or HIPE Lab for short to address this critical public safety issue.
The HIPE Lab is designed to help public health professionals gain greater insights into how to combat health myths and disinformation in their communities.
There are three parts to the HIPE Lab:
- HIPE interactive dashboard. The HIPE interactive dashboard provides actionable insights to miss and disinformation that enables a rapid response and counter messaging strategies.
- Social Journey. The social journey tells the story of how different people's health decisions are influenced by the many sources of information they encounter throughout their day. You can follow different people as they navigate all of the health information to make decisions about getting a COVID-19 vaccine.
- Ground game. This is a space to test and research ongoing health-related miss and disinformation topics and apply the findings to real-world challenges.
Let's take a look at how HIPE lab works:
In a real-life case study Miami Dade county faced a challenge with low COVID-19 vaccination rates among black and Haitian communities.
We used the hype dashboard to understand what people in their community were talking about it highlighted the major themes and mis- and disinformation around vaccines.
It also showed what type of persuasion drivers were being used particularly with anti-vaccine messages. This helped health communication scientists to develop targeted messaging to not only counter the mis- and disinformation but help the community members to get accurate information in plain language so that they could make informed health decisions about the COVID-19 vaccine.
HIPE Lab provides the data and insights to health communication and public health professionals so that they can create evidence-based strategies to help communities make informed health decisions for better health outcomes.
The HIPE Lab: Building the healthy information environment for the future you.
HIPE Framework
Detect
MITRE’s Social Integrity Platform captures, analyzes, and reports evolving topics and narratives across social media platforms at national and local levels. Additional analyses of social media data include identification of inauthentic activity, bot detection, suspicious behavior, and other amplification strategies.
Analyze
HIPE leverages persuasion algorithms for analysis of people and place via online discourse to understand community-level social norms, values, beliefs, fears, social determinants of health, language barriers, digital literacy levels, and availability/accessibility of health services.
Design
Tailored and targeted response strategies drive positive behavior change by matching key community characteristics like communication channels, language preferences, literacy levels, or use of influencers.
Evaluate
Assess whether messages and response strategies drive positive behaviors. Formative evaluation (e.g., message testing) ensures desired outcomes are achieved. Feedback from evaluation informs campaign design and allows for timely decision-making.
Detect
MITRE’s Social Integrity Platform captures, analyzes, and reports evolving topics and narratives across social media platforms at national and local levels. Additional analyses of social media data include identification of inauthentic activity, bot detection, suspicious behavior, and other amplification strategies.
Analyze
HIPE leverages persuasion algorithms for analysis of people and place via online discourse to understand community-level social norms, values, beliefs, fears, social determinants of health, language barriers, digital literacy levels, and availability/accessibility of health services.
Design
Tailored and targeted response strategies drive positive behavior change by matching key community characteristics like communication channels, language preferences, literacy levels, or use of influencers.
Evaluate
Assess whether messages and response strategies drive positive behaviors. Formative evaluation (e.g., message testing) ensures desired outcomes are achieved. Feedback from evaluation informs campaign design and allows for timely decision-making.
More About HIPE
How is the HIPE framework different than what exists today?
HIPE enables two key opportunities that are not supported by other approaches: 1) It offers data-driven insights built on national data to understand how individuals are exposed to and affected by harmful or potentially misleading information that is then refined with local data and specific population characteristics, and 2) it enables precision communication by generating tailored messaging response strategies and evaluating the impact on specific populations.
How has HIPE been applied to date?
HIPE was initially developed by MITRE in response to the expanding and complicated information ecosystem, where online narratives were impacting the health and well-being of the nation. When the pandemic began in 2020, focus shifted to conversations about COVID-19 and vaccines. The HIPE Lab successfully identified and illuminated ongoing and emerging narratives in online information that contributed to low vaccination rates and vaccine hesitancy. The Lab generated evidence-based recommendations that led to the development of messaging campaigns and other interventions in the following underserved communities:
Miami-Dade County, Florida: Partnership with Florida International University from July to December 2021 resulted in 850 COVID-19 vaccinations for Black/Haitian members of 51 local churches. Post-intervention vaccination rates for adults over 18 in Miami-Dade passed 80% (10-15% higher than neighboring counties).
Central Valley, California: Partnership with community health organizations from April to June 2022 resulted in higher vaccination rates in intervention counties compared to non-intervention counties. The 5 to11-year-old age group (which was a focus of the campaign) saw a 20% increase in vaccination rates within migrant agricultural communities of Stanislaus and Merced counties.
Related Research Papers
- COVID-19 Vaccine Discourse on Twitter: A Content Analysis of Persuasion Techniques, Sentiment and Mis/Disinformation
- Combatting Mis/Disinformation: Combining Predictive Modeling and Machine Learning with Persuasion Science to Understand COVID-19 Vaccine Online Discourse
- A Comparative Case Study Analysis: Applying the HIPE Framework to Combat Harmful Health Information and Drive COVID-19 Vaccine Adoption in Underserved Communities
