The proliferation of fake news on social media is now a matter of considerable public and governmental concern. In 2016, the UK EU referendum and the US Presidential election were both marked by social media misinformation campaigns, which have subsequently reduced trust in democratic processes. More recently, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the acceptance of fake news has been shown to pose a threat to public health. Research on how to combat the false acceptance of fake news is still in its infancy. However, recent studies have started to focus on the psychological factors which might make some individuals less likely to fall for fake news. Here, we adopt that approach to assess whether individuals who show high levels of ‘emotional intelligence’ (EQ) are less likely to fall for fake news items. That is, are individuals who are better able to disregard the emotionally charged content of such items, better equipped to assess the veracity of the information. Using a sample of UK participants, an established measure of EQ and a novel fake news detection task, we report a significant positive relationship between individual differences in emotional intelligence and fake news detection ability. We also report a similar effect for higher levels of educational attainment, and we report some exploratory qualitative fake news judgement data. Our findings are discussed in terms of their applicability to practical short term (i.e. current Facebook user data) and medium term (i.e. emotional intelligence training) interventions which could enhance fake news detection.

Studies show that voters make judgements about politicians-their competence, honesty, warmth and so on-on the basis of physical appearance, and that these judgements can influence voting behaviour. This raises the possibility of two different gender gaps: (i) female and male candidates may be evaluated differently, ultimately affecting their relative electoral performance; and (ii) female and male voters may react differently to candidate images. We explore this using a stacked data set of evaluations of 36 UK MPs by 368 undergraduate students, and find evidence of both gender gaps. First, we confirm the persistent finding that voters assign 'warmth' traits to female and 'strength' traits to male candidates. Such stereotyping has an interesting impact on electoral preference: male candidates were judged more by warmth, female candidates more by strength, suggesting that stereotypical traits were taken for granted. Second, we find male voters more likely than female voters to see male candidates as stronger, and to prioritise strength in voting. Our results also support the view that gender and appearance heuristics are relied on most by those with little other basis for judgement, such as non-partisans. Hence, while gender effects on voting are weak when averaged across the whole electorate, they could be much stronger for (expanding) sub-groups of voters.

A growing body of literature has found that photographs of politicians can influence electoral preferences. In this article we assess whether candidates rating higher on electoral attractiveness perform better in a series of hypothetical elections, and whether their advantage is magnified when their appearance is printed not only on campaign materials but also on ballot papers. We find that candidate appearance only had a significant impact on vote choice when photographs were printed on ballot papers, and even then there was an impact on only some of the elections, notably those pitting male against female candidates. Photographs had most impact on the choices of those least interested in politics and least likely to vote, and magnified a tendency (among voters of all ages) to favour younger candidates and to penalise older candidates. Findings suggest that the addition of photographs to ballot papers could affect the outcomes of marginal British constituency races.

Referendums often fail to live up to a deliberative standard, with many characterised by low levels of knowledge, disinterest and misinformation, negativity, and a focus on extraneous issues to which voters are voting. But social media offers new avenues for referendums to incorporate a greater deliberative dimension. Through a content analysis of BBC discussion forums, we test whether online discussion of the Scottish independence referendum has deliberative characteristics. Results suggest a mixed picture with conversation displaying some deliberative features (low incidences of flaming/discussion of referendum issues).However, low levels of discussion intensity, dominance by a few, little knowledge exchange, and high gender inequality illustrate that online referendum discussion lacks deliberative characteristics, implying that social media are not a panacea for referendum deliberation.

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