Jana Vyrastekova

So let me speak about the program that we designed, which we called ReConnect.

We designed it with a colleague of mine, Natasha Wagner, and two other colleagues, Konstantino Marku and Sarah Arts.

And we were all colleagues at the same department sharing the same feeling of unease around how

post-corona education was coming in movement and the students were not coming to the classroom and nobody knew why.

And we just sat down and we said, there is something not okay.

We worry, but we don't really take an action.

So we decided to take an action.

And the action that we decided to take was very much motivated by what we knew about how loneliness develops.

It's not something that is from the start.

as bad as we speak about it.

It's not immediately this heavy social anxiety and so on.

It's simply a feeling something is not right in my social environment.

I have to connect more.

And we thought we have to tap into this.

We have to create a space where people who have that feeling, wanting to connect more, would know where to go.

And that was how we constructed Reconnect.

That is definitely important as psychologists are telling us, and I'm not a psychologist, I'm a behavioral economist.

So I was kind of learning from the experts, so to say.

What we as behavioral economists know very well is that when we design an intervention, we need a control group, we need evidence-based approach.

We need to measure things, and that's sometimes a little bit, you know, uneasy.