The powerful allure of social media platforms has been attributed to the human need for social rewards. Here we demonstrate that the spread of misinformation on such platforms is facilitated by existing social ‘carrots’ (e.g., ‘likes’) and ‘sticks’ (e.g., ‘dislikes’) that are dissociated from the veracity of the information shared. Testing 951 participants over six experiments, we show that a slight change to the incentive structure of social media platforms, such that social rewards and punishments are contingent on information veracity, produces a considerable increase in the discernment of shared information and increases belief accuracy. Computational modeling revealed the underlying mechanism of this effect is associated with an increase in the weight participants assign to evidence consistent with discerning behavior. The results offer evidence for an intervention that could be adopted to reduce misinformation spread, which in turn could reduce violence, vaccine hesitancy and political polarization, without reducing engagement.

The powerful allure of social media platforms has been attributed to the human need for social rewards. Here, we demonstrate that the spread of misinformation on such platforms is facilitated by existing social ‘carrots’ (e.g., ‘likes’) and ‘sticks’ (e.g., ‘dislikes’) that are dissociated from the veracity of the information shared. Testing 951 participants over six experiments, we show that a slight change to the incentive structure of social media platforms, such that social rewards and punishments are contingent on information veracity, produces a considerable increase in the discernment of shared information. Namely, an increase in the proportion of true information shared relative to the proportion of false information shared. Computational modeling (i.e., drift-diffusion models) revealed the underlying mechanism of this effect is associated with an increase in the weight participants assign to evidence consistent with discerning behavior. The results offer evidence for an intervention that could be adopted to reduce misinformation spread, which in turn could reduce violence, vaccine hesitancy and political polarization, without reducing engagement.

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