Personality and misinformation

Misinformation poses a significant concern, promoting false beliefs and eroding trust in media. People differ in their susceptibility to believe and to share misinformation. In this article, we reviewed recent research on relationships between personality traits and belief in and sharing of misinformation. Findings show that more extroverted and less conscientious and agreeable people tend to be more susceptible to believing in and sharing misinformation. Additionally, the Dark Triad personality traits of narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism tend to be positively associated with sharing of misinformation, and narcissism and psychopathy are associated with greater belief in misinformation. Understanding these individual differences can inform interventions to reduce the effects of misinformation.

Partisan bias in false memories for misinformation about the 2021 U.S. Capitol riot

ABSTRACTMemory for events can be biased. For example, people tend to recall more events that support than oppose their current worldview. The present study examined partisan bias in memory for events related to the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot in the United States. Participants rated their memory for true and false events that were either favourable to their political party or the other major political party in the United States. For both true and false events, participants remembered more events that favoured their political party. Regression analyses showed that the number of false memories that participants reported was positively associated with their tendency to support conspiracy beliefs and with their self-reported engagement with the Capitol riot. These results suggest that Democrats and Republicans remember the Capitol Riot differently and that certain individual difference factors can predict the formation of false memories in this context. Misinformation played an influential role in the Capitol riot and understanding differences in memory for this event is beneficial to avoiding similar tragedies in the future.

A within-subjects test of ego depletion and potential moderators

Ego depletion, the finding that initial exertion of self-control hinders performance on subsequent self-control tasks, has become a controversial topic. There have been discrepant results from empirical studies and different conclusions drawn from meta-analyses and multilab studies. We examined ego depletion and three potential moderators in a preregistered experiment using a within-subjects design in order to overcome limitations of the standard between-subjects design. In two sessions separated by 1 week, participants (N = 214) completed an ego depletion or control version of a Stroop task. Each Stroop task was followed by manipulation check questions and an antisaccade task. Participants also completed measures of lay theory of willpower, trait self-control, and action orientation. There was no significant evidence for ego depletion, and Bayes factors strongly favored the null hypotheses that there was no difference in antisaccade performance (accuracy or response time) after ego depletion and control Stroop tasks. Additionally, lay theory willpower, trait self-control, and action orientation were not significantly related to ego depletion effects. Exploratory between-subjects comparisons that omitted participants who responded at lower than chance accuracy levels, however, found significant ego depletion effects. These results provide further evidence that ego depletion effects are elusive.

Does the "surprisingly popular" method yield accurate crowdsourced predictions?

The “surprisingly popular” method (SP) of aggregating individual judgments has shown promise in overcoming a weakness of other crowdsourcing methods—situations in which the majority is incorrect. This method relies on participants’ estimates of other participants’ judgments; when an option is chosen more often than the average metacognitive judgments of that option, it is “surprisingly popular” and is selected by the method. Although SP has been shown to improve group decision making about factual propositions (e.g., state capitals), its application to future outcomes has been limited. In three preregistered studies, we compared SP to other methods of aggregating individual predictions about future events. Study 1 examined predictions of football games, Study 2 examined predictions of the 2018 US midterm elections, and Study 3 examined predictions of basketball games. When applied to judgments made by objectively assessed experts, SP performed slightly better than other aggregation methods. Although there is still more to learn about the conditions under which SP is effective, it shows promise as a means of crowdsourcing predictions of future outcomes.

An initial accuracy focus reduces the effect of prior exposure on perceived accuracy of news headlines

The illusory truth effect occurs when the repetition of a claim increases its perceived truth. Previous studies have demonstrated the illusory truth effect with true and false news headlines. The present study examined the effects that different ratings made during initial exposure have on the illusory truth effect with news headlines. In two experiments, participants (total N = 575) rated a set of news headlines in one of two conditions. Some participants rated how interesting they were, and others rated how truthful they were. Participants later rated the perceived accuracy of a larger set of headlines that included previously rated and new headlines. In both experiments, prior exposure increased perceived accuracy for participants who made initial interest ratings, but not for participants who made initial truthfulness ratings. The increase in perceived accuracy that accompanies repeated exposure was attenuated when participants considered the accuracy of the headlines at initial exposure. Experiment 2 also found evidence for a political bias: participants rated politically concordant headlines as more accurate than politically discordant headlines. The magnitude of this bias was related to performance on a cognitive reflection test; more analytic participants demonstrated greater political bias. These results highlight challenges that fake news presents and suggest that initially encoding headlines’ perceived truth can serve to combat the illusion that a familiar headline is a truthful one.

Political Ideology Predicts Perceptions of the Threat of COVID-19 (and Susceptibility to Fake News About It)

The present research examined the relationship between political ideology and perceptions of the threat of COVID-19. Due to Republican leadership’s initial downplaying of COVID-19 and the resulting partisan media coverage, we predicted that conservatives would perceive it as less threatening. Two preregistered online studies supported this prediction. Conservatism was associated with perceiving less personal vulnerability to the virus and the virus’s severity as lower, and stronger endorsement of the beliefs that the media had exaggerated the virus’s impact and that the spread of the virus was a conspiracy. Conservatism also predicted less accurate discernment between real and fake COVID-19 headlines and fewer accurate responses to COVID-19 knowledge questions. Path analyses suggested that presidential approval, knowledge about COVID-19, and news discernment mediated the relationship between ideology and perceived vulnerability. These results suggest that the relationship between political ideology and threat perceptions may depend on issue framing by political leadership and media.

To detect or not to detect: A replication and extension of the three-stage model

When faced with a decision, people generally show a bias toward heuristic processing, even if it leads to the incorrect decision, such as in the base-rate neglect task. The crucial question is whether people know that they are biased. Recently, the three-stage model (Pennycook, Fugelsang, & Koehler, 2015) suggested that detecting this bias (conflict detection) is imperfect and a consistent source of bias because some people do not recognize that they are making biased decisions. In Experiment 1, participants completed a base-rate neglect task as replication of Pennycook et al. (2015). In Experiment 2, a conditional reasoning task was added as an extension to test the boundary conditions of the model. Results in Experiment 1 indicated that detection failures were a significant source of bias. However, results in Experiment 2 on the conditional reasoning task indicated that the three-stage model may be incompatible with a complex task such as conditional reasoning, an issue explored in detail in the General discussion.

A Multilab Preregistered Replication of the Ego-Depletion Effect

Good self-control has been linked to adaptive outcomes such as better health, cohesive personal relationships, success in the workplace and at school, and less susceptibility to crime and addictions. In contrast, self-control failure is linked to maladaptive outcomes. Understanding the mechanisms by which self-control predicts behavior may assist in promoting better regulation and outcomes. A popular approach to understanding self-control is the strength or resource depletion model. Self-control is conceptualized as a limited resource that becomes depleted after a period of exertion resulting in self-control failure. The model has typically been tested using a sequential-task experimental paradigm, in which people completing an initial self-control task have reduced self-control capacity and poorer performance on a subsequent task, a state known as ego depletion Although a meta-analysis of ego-depletion experiments found a medium-sized effect, subsequent meta-analyses have questioned the size and existence of the effect and identified instances of possible bias. The analyses served as a catalyst for the current Registered Replication Report of the ego-depletion effect. Multiple laboratories (k = 23, total N = 2,141) conducted replications of a standardized ego-depletion protocol based on a sequential-task paradigm by Sripada et al. Meta-analysis of the studies revealed that the size of the ego-depletion effect was small with 95% confidence intervals (CIs) that encompassed zero (d = 0.04, 95% CI [-0.07, 0.15]. We discuss implications of the findings for the ego-depletion effect and the resource depletion model of self-control.

The misinformation effect is unrelated to the DRM effect with and without a DRM warning

The misinformation and Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigms are used to study forms of false memories. Despite the abundance of research using these two paradigms, few studies have examined the relationship between the errors that arise from them. In the present study, 160 participants completed a misinformation task and two DRM tasks, receiving a warning about the effect before the second DRM task. Participants demonstrated misinformation and DRM effects (with and without the warning), but susceptibility to these forms of false memory were not significantly related across individuals. The DRM warning reduced the DRM effect, and signal detection analysis revealed that the DRM warning reduced a liberal response bias in this task. Sensitivity and response bias in both DRM tasks were not significantly related to these measures in the misinformation task. These findings suggest that these two forms of false memories are not interchangeable and they appear to be the result of different cognitive processes.

Evolutionary relevance facilitates visual information processing

Visual search of the environment is a fundamental human behavior that perceptual load affects powerfully. Previously investigated means for overcoming the inhibitions of high perceptual load, however, generalize poorly to real-world human behavior. We hypothesized that humans would process evolutionarily relevant stimuli more efficiently than evolutionarily novel stimuli, and evolutionary relevance would mitigate the repercussions of high perceptual load during visual search. Animacy is a significant component to evolutionary relevance of visual stimuli because perceiving animate entities is time-sensitive in ways that pose significant evolutionary consequences. Participants completing a visual search task located evolutionarily relevant and animate objects fastest and with the least impact of high perceptual load. Evolutionarily novel and inanimate objects were located slowest and with the highest impact of perceptual load. Evolutionary relevance may importantly affect everyday visual information processing.

The role of similarity in deductive categorical inference

The category inclusion rule specifies that categories inherit the properties of their superordinates. For example, given that all metals are pentavalent, it can be concluded that all iron is pentavalent. Sloman (1998) showed that people do not fully endorse conclusions that follow from the category inclusion rule. He claims that people rely on the similarity between the premise and the conclusion categories (metals and iron), rather than applying the category inclusion rule. By allowing reasoners to rate their certainty for category relations (e.g., iron is metal), as well as for conclusions, the present study shows that similarity has only an indirect effect on the certainty of conclusions: Reasoners are more certain that similar categories have a category inclusion relation, and this in turn affects the certainty of conclusions based on this relation.