The rise of “fake news” is a major concern in contemporary Western democracies. Yet, research on the psychological motivations behind the spread of political fake news on social media is surprisingly limited. Are citizens who share fake news ignorant and lazy? Are they fueled by sinister motives, seeking to disrupt the social status quo? Or do they seek to attack partisan opponents in an increasingly polarized political environment? This article is the first to test these competing hypotheses based on a careful mapping of psychological profiles of over 2,300 American Twitter users linked to behavioral sharing data and sentiment analyses of more than 500,000 news story headlines. The findings contradict the ignorance perspective but provide some support for the disruption perspective and strong support for the partisan polarization perspective. Thus, individuals who report hating their political opponents are the most likely to share political fake news and selectively share content that is useful for derogating these opponents. Overall, our findings show that fake news sharing is fueled by the same psychological motivations that drive other forms of partisan behavior, including sharing partisan news from traditional and credible news sources.

The rise of “fake news” is a major concern in contemporary Western democracies. Yet, research on the psychological motivations behind the spread of “fake news” on social media is surprisingly limited. Are citizens who share fake news ignorant and lazy? Are they fueled by sinister motives, seeking to disrupt the social status quo? Or do they seek to attack partisan opponents in an increasingly polarized political environment? This manuscript is the first to test these competing hypotheses based on a careful mapping of psychological profiles linked to behavioral data and a sentiment analysis of shared news headlines from over 2,300 American Twitter users. The findings contradict the ignorance perspective, but provide some support for the disruption perspective and strong support for the partisan polarization perspective. Thus, individuals who report hating their political opponents are the most likely to share “fake news.” Overall, our findings demonstrate that “fake news” sharing is fueled by the same psychological motivations that drive other forms of partisan behavior, including sharing partisan news from traditional and credible news sources.

Throughout human evolutionary history, cooperative contact with others has been fundamental for human survival. At the same time, social contact has been a source of threats. In this article, we focus on one particular viable threat, communicable disease, and investigate how motivations to avoid pathogens influence people's propensity to interact and cooperate with others, as measured by individual differences in generalized social trust. While extant studies on pathogen avoidance have argued that such motivations should prompt people to avoid interactions with outgroups specifically, we argue that these motivations should prompt people to avoid others more broadly. Empirically, we utilize two convenience samples and a large nationally representative sample of US citizens to demonstrate the existence of a robust and replicable effect of individual differences in pathogen disgust sensitivity on generalized social trust. We furthermore compare the effects of pathogen disgust sensitivity on generalized social trust and outgroup prejudice and explore whether generalized social trust to some extent constitutes a pathway between pathogen avoidance motivations and prejudice.

Why are some people motivated to share hostile political rumors, such as conspiracy theories and other derogatory news stories? Previous research mostly focuses on the thesis that people’s partisan identities motivate them to share hostile political rumors as a way to tarnish their political opponents. In this manuscript, we demonstrate disruptive psychological motivations also play an important, but often overlooked, role in the spread of hostile rumors. We argue that many individuals who feel socially and politically marginalized are motivated to circulate hostile rumors because they wish to unleash chaos to “burn down” the entire established political order in the hope they can gain status in the process. We conducted 8 large studies (including a nationally representative study) to show that some individuals are predisposed to have a Need for Chaos when facing social isolation and discontent, and that this need is the strongest predictor of explicit motivations to share hostile political rumors. Panel and experimental data show that chaotic motivations reflect an interplay between traits related to status-seeking and states of social exclusion. Consistent with the rising inequality in the United States and beyond, we find that these motivations are strikingly prevalent. To stem the tide of hostile political rumors on social media, the present findings suggest that real-world policy solutions are needed to address the growing social and political frustrations of democratic populations.

People form political attitudes to serve psychological needs. Recent research shows that some individuals have a strong desire to incite chaos when they perceive themselves to be marginalized by society. These individuals tend to see chaos as a way to invert the power structure and gain social status in the process. Analysing data drawn from large-scale representative surveys conducted in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States, we identify the prevalence of Need for Chaos across Anglo-Saxon societies. Using Latent Profile Analysis, we explore whether different subtypes underlie the uni-dimensional construct and find evidence that some people may be motivated to seek out chaos because they want to rebuild society, while others enjoy destruction for its own sake. We demonstrate that chaos-seekers are not a unified political group but a divergent set of malcontents. Multiple pathways can lead individuals to ‘want to watch the world burn’. This article is part of the theme issue ‘The political brain: neurocognitive and computational mechanisms’.