No abstract

Fake news sharing in 2016 was rare but significantly more common among older Americans.

Political debate concerning moralized issues is increasingly common in online social networks. However, moral psychology has yet to incorporate the study of social networks to investigate processes by which some moral ideas spread more rapidly or broadly than others. Here, we show that the expression of moral emotion is key for the spread of moral and political ideas in online social networks, a process we call "moral contagion." Using a large sample of social media communications about three polarizing moral/political issues (n = 563,312), we observed that the presence of moral-emotional words in messages increased their diffusion by a factor of 20% for each additional word. Furthermore, we found that moral contagion was bounded by group membership; moral-emotional language increased diffusion more strongly within liberal and conservative networks, and less between them. Our results highlight the importance of emotion in the social transmission of moral ideas and also demonstrate the utility of social network methods for studying morality. These findings offer insights into how people are exposed to moral and political ideas through social networks, thus expanding models of social influence and group polarization as people become increasingly immersed in social media networks.O ur sense of right and wrong shapes our daily interactions in a variety of domains such as political participation, consumer choices, and close relationships. What factors inform our intuitions about morality? Influential theories in psychology maintain that our moral sense is shaped by the social world (1), insofar as decades of research demonstrate that social communities influence moral development in children (2) and account for cross-cultural variation in moral beliefs (3). Furthermore, social information serves as input for cognitive and emotional processes in moral judgment and decision-making (4).Despite a broad consensus that morality is influenced by attitudes and norms transmitted by our social world, remarkably little work has examined how social networks transmit moral attitudes and norms. Most existing research takes a dyadic perspective to study the social transmission of morality; typically, one person (such as a child) is exposed to another's ideas (e.g., parent) through behavior or communication (1, 2). In society, the transmission of morality goes well beyond the dyad. Our moods, thoughts, and actions are shaped by the entire network of individuals with whom we share direct and indirect relationships (5). Thus, we often develop similar ideas and intuitions as others because we are socially connected to them (6). This phenomenon is often deemed social "contagion" because it mimics the spread of disease. We use a social contagion perspective to illuminate how morally tinged messages about political issues are transmitted through social networks.Research on the emotional underpinnings of morality provides a theoretical framework to understand the processes that may drive social contagion in the domain of morality. Emotions...

The COVID-19 pandemic represents a massive global health crisis. Because the crisis requires large-scale behaviour change and places significant psychological burdens on individuals, insights from the social and behavioural sciences can be used to help align human behavior with the recommendations of epidemiologists and public health experts. Here we discuss evidence from a selection of research topics relevant to pandemics, including work on navigating threats, social and cultural influences on behaviour, science communication, moral decision-making, leadership, and stress and coping. In each section, we note the nature and quality of prior research, including uncertainty and unsettled issues. We identify several insights for effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and also highlight important gaps researchers should move quickly to fill in the coming weeks and months.

A poisonous cocktail of othering, aversion, and moralization poses a threat to democracy