The concept of ‘fake news’ has exploded into the public’s consciousness since the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency in late 2016. However, this concept has received surprisingly little attention within the social psychological literature. We present three studies (N = 2,275) exploring whether liberal and conservative partisans are motivated to believe fake news (Study 1; n = 722) or dismiss true news that contradicts their position as being fake (Study 2; n = 570). We found support for both of these hypotheses. These effects were asymmetrically moderated by collective narcissism, need for cognition, and faith in intuition (Study 3; n = 983). These findings suggest that partisans across the political spectrum engage with the ‘fake news’ label in a motivated manner, though these motivations appear to differ between-groups. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

As the domains of social and personality psychological science undergo marked changes in their approach to research (e.g., open science practices, and addressing the replication crisis), it is important to undertake a full review of the tools and measures that we have at our disposal.In addition, the growing sense of political and ideological polarization in contemporary western democracies necessitates a coherent and internally consistent approach to studying politically and ideologically sensitive topics. This paper explores the measurement and study of such topics, and posits that claims about (a)symmetries between ideological partisans may be rooted in different measurement approaches. A more consistent and ecologically valid approach to studying partisan engagement with political topics is advocated, focusing on situational responses to ideologically salient scenarios, rather than placing our focus on results from decontextualized self-report individual difference measures. Suggestions for broader debiasing research reforms are also explored. Ideological measurement in social and political psychologyThe landscape of social psychology is currently undergoing some stark changes.Emerging practices to address the 'replication crisis' (Brandt et al., 2014;Lindsay, 2015) and the advent of increasingly open research practices, such as data-and materials-sharing, protocol and analytic pre-registration, and the peer-review of research plans before data are collected and results are known (Chambers, 2018;van't Veer & Giner-Sorolla, 2016; have led the field to consider some of the questionable research practices that have historically persisted in some spheres .Although these movements are clearly positive for the state of our science, they focus only on the higher-level processes associated with potential biases in research design and execution. This paper begins by looking at the 'nuts and bolts' of social and personality psychological research, as applied in the political domain, to explore potential sources of ideological bias in the conceptualization and interpretation of ideologies. That is, there is an argument to be made that our current approaches to studying similarities and differences between those from competing political or ideological persuasions (from here, these similarities and differences are referred to as 'political/ideological (a)symmetries') may contain epistemic biases on the part of the field in the aggregate. In doing so, a critique of commonly used measurement tools in the political psychology domain is offered, and further suggestions for alternative approaches to researching ideological (a)symmetries are offered that are consistent with the continuing the recent advances in social psychological research.

COVID-19 has plagued the globe since January 2020, infecting millions and claiming the lives of several hundreds of thousands (at the time of writing). Despite this, many individuals have ignored public health guidance and continued to socialize in groups. Emergent work has highlighted the potential role that ideology plays in such behavior, and judgements of it. In response to this contemporary cultural phenomenon, we tested whether judgements of those allegedly flouting the guidance on social distancing were influenced by an interaction between the ideologies of those providing judgements, and those allegedly breaking the rules. Our data suggest that judgements of those flouting social distancing guidance are influenced by ideology in a symmetrical way. That is, both liberals and conservatives condemn outgroup flouting more than ingroup flouting. We discuss this finding in the context of theoretical work into ideological symmetries, and the implications of growing ideological polarization in contemporary Western democracies.

In recent times there has been an upturn in the rates of polarization in contemporary democracies, with increasing unrest and incivility between those of different voting factions. In this paper, we investigated whether higher levels of empathy might be associated with reduced levels of polarization, and whether such effects were consistent across different voter groups. A final sample of 262 British voters (Study 1) and 385 American partisans (Study 2) completed measures of cognitive and affective empathy, ingroup identification, and outgroup polarization. Across both studies, lower levels of polarization were predicted by higher levels of cognitive empathy and were greater in ‘Remain’ and ‘Democrat’ voters. However, the significant relationship between ingroup identification and polarization was not moderated by empathy or vote choice. As such, we believe that polarization in these contexts may be conceptualized as being tribal in nature, and symmetrical across different and opposing groups of voters. Nonetheless, we do provide evidence that higher levels of cognitive empathy for one’s political outgroups may reduce polarization in highly politicized contexts.

A recent study by Baltiansky, Craig, & Jost (2020) tested two hypotheses related to system justification and the perception of stereotypical humor. They reported to have found evidence for a cross-over interaction, with judgments of jokes being contingent on a combination of the social status of the targets of jokes and raters’ system justification motivations. Here, we discuss the original analysis, presentation, and interpretation of the data in Baltiansky et al. (2020), before presenting a re-analysis of the authors’ shared data file. We show that the framing of claims such as “high system-justifiers found jokes targeting low-status groups (e.g., women, poor people, racial/ethnic minorities) to be funnier than low system-justifiers did” (p. 1) are misleading in their framing. Instead, our re-analyses suggest that ideological differences in joke perception are driven primarily by those scoring low on the system justification motivation rating jokes about ostensibly low-status groups as less funny than jokes about other social groups.