Sharing of misinformation can be catastrophic, especially during times of national importance.Typically studied in political contexts, sharing of fake news has been positively linked with conservative political ideology. However, such sweeping generalizations run the risk of increasing already rampant political polarization. We offer a more nuanced account by proposing that the sharing of fake news is largely driven by low conscientiousness conservatives. At high levels of conscientiousness there is no difference between liberals and conservatives. We find support for our hypotheses in the contexts of Covid-19, political, and neutral news across 8 studies (six pre-registered; two conceptual replications) with 4,642 participants and 91,144 unique participant-news observations. A general desire for chaos explains the interactive effect of political ideology and conscientiousness on the sharing of fake news. Furthermore, our findings indicate the inadequacy of fact-checker interventions to deter the spread of fake news. This underscores the challenges associated with tackling fake news, especially during a crisis like Covid-19 where misinformation impairs the ability of governments to curtail the pandemic.

Significance Gender inequality has been deemed the “greatest human rights challenge of our time” by the United Nations, and scholars across numerous disciplines agree that gender stereotypes represent a primary way by which this inequality is maintained. Yet changing stereotypes in a systemic, enduring way is extremely difficult. This is at least in part because stereotypes are transmitted and perpetuated through the language societies and organizations use to describe women, especially those in leadership roles. Here, we show that hiring women into leadership positions is associated with organizations characterizing women in more leadership-congruent, agentic ways. This shift mitigates a critical barrier to women’s progression in organizations and society: the incongruence of what it means to be a woman and a leader.

Research on judgment and decision making has suggested that the System 2 process of slow thinking can help people to improve their decision making by reducing well-established statistical decision biases (including base rate neglect, probability matching, and the conjunction fallacy). In a large pre-registered study with 1,706 participants and 23,292 unique observations, we compare the effects of individual differences and behavioral interventions to test the relative benefits of slow thinking on performance in canonical judgment and decision-making problems, compared to a control condition, a fast thinking condition, an incentive condition, and a condition that combines fast and slow thinking. We also draw on the rule-based reasoning literature to examine the benefits of having access to a simple form of the rule needed to solve a specific focal problem. Overall, we find equivocal evidence of a small benefit from slow thinking, evidence for a small benefit to accuracy incentives, and clear evidence of a larger cost from fast thinking. The difference in performance between fast-thinking and slow-thinking interventions is comparable to a one-scale point difference on the 4-point Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT). Inferential rules contribute unique explanatory power and interact with individual differences to support the idea that System 2 benefits from a combination of slower processes and knowledge appropriate to the problem.

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Fake news can foster political polarization, foment division between groups, and encourage malicious behavior. Misinformation has cast doubt on the integrity of democratic elections, downplayed the seriousness of COVID-19, and increased vaccine hesitancy. Given the leading role that online groups play in the dissemination of fake news, in this research we examined how group-level factors contribute to sharing misinformation. By unobtrusively tracking interactions among 51,537 Twitter user dyads longitudinally over two time periods (n = 103,074), we found that group members who did not conform to the behavior of other group members by sharing fake news were subjected to reduced social interaction over time. We augmented this unique, ecologically valid behavioral data with another digital field study (N = 178,411) and five experiments to disentangle some of the causal mechanisms driving the observed effects. We found that social costs were higher for not sharing fake news versus other content, that specific types of deviant group members faced the greatest social costs, and that social costs explained fake news sharing above and beyond partisan identity and subjective accuracy assessments. Overall, our work illuminates the role of conformity pressure as a critical antecedent of the spread of misinformation.