Nevertheless, partisanship persisted: fake news warnings help briefly, but bias returns with time.

Politically oriented "fake news"-false stories or headlines created to support or attack a political position or person-is increasingly being shared and believed on social media. Many online platforms have taken steps to address this by adding a warning label to articles identified as false, but past research has shown mixed evidence for the effectiveness of such labels, and many prior studies have looked only at either short-term impacts or non-political information. This study tested three versions of fake news labels with 541 online participants in a two-wave study. A warning that came before a false headline was initially very effective in both discouraging belief in false headlines generally and eliminating a partisan congruency effect (the tendency to believe politically congenial information more readily than politically uncongenial information). In the follow-up survey two weeks later, however, we found both high levels of belief in the articles and the re-emergence of a partisan congruency effect in all warning conditions, even though participants had known just two weeks ago the items were false. The new pre-warning before the headline showed some small improvements over other types, but did not stop people from believing the article once seen again without a warning. This finding suggests that warnings do have an important immediate impact and may work well in the short term, though the durability of that protection is limited.

Remembering facts versus feelings in the wake of political events.

Amid rising political polarisation, inaccurate memory for facts and exaggerated memories of grievances can drive individuals and groups further apart. We assessed whether people with more accurate memories of the facts concerning political events were less susceptible to bias when remembering how events made them feel. Study 1 assessed participants' memories concerning the 2016 U.S. presidential election (N = 571), and included 33 individuals with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM). Study 2 assessed participants' memories concerning the 2018 referendum on abortion in Ireland (N = 733). Participants rated how happy, angry, and scared they felt days after these events. Six months later, they recalled their feelings and factual information. In both studies, participants overestimated how angry they had felt but underestimated happiness and fear. Adjusting for importance, no association was found between the accuracy of memory for facts and feelings. Accuracy in remembering facts was predicted by media exposure. Accuracy in remembering feelings was predicted by consistency over time in feelings and appraisals about past events. HSAM participants in Study 1 remembered election-related facts better than others, but not their feelings. Thus, having a good grasp of the facts did not protect against bias in remembering feelings about political events.

Fool me twice: how effective is debriefing in false memory studies?

Deception is often necessary in false memory studies, especially when the study aims to explore the effect of misinformation on memory. At the end of the study, participants are debriefed, but does this eliminate the influence of misinformation? In the current study, we followed up 630 participants six months after they participated in a study in which they were exposed to fabricated political news stories. We compared the memories of these "continuing participants" for both novel and previously seen news stories to the memories of 474 newly recruited participants. Relative to new recruits, continuing participants were less likely to report a false memory for a story that they had been previously exposed to, and they were also less likely to report a false memory for a novel fake news story. Continuing participants were more likely to report a memory for previously seen true events than novel true events. Both groups of participants reported enjoying the experience and feeling confident that they understood which stories were fabricated. Importantly, this study did not find any negative long-term effects of participating in our false memory experiment, and even exhibited some positive effects.

False Memories for Fake News During Ireland's Abortion Referendum.

The current study examined false memories in the week preceding the 2018 Irish abortion referendum. Participants (N = 3,140) viewed six news stories concerning campaign events-two fabricated and four authentic. Almost half of the sample reported a false memory for at least one fabricated event, with more than one third of participants reporting a specific memory of the event. "Yes" voters (those in favor of legalizing abortion) were more likely than "no" voters to "remember" a fabricated scandal regarding the campaign to vote "no," and "no" voters were more likely than "yes" voters to "remember" a fabricated scandal regarding the campaign to vote "yes." This difference was particularly strong for voters of low cognitive ability. A subsequent warning about possible misinformation slightly reduced rates of false memories but did not eliminate these effects. This study suggests that voters in a real-world political campaign are most susceptible to forming false memories for fake news that aligns with their beliefs, in particular if they have low cognitive ability.

Impact of Gruesome Photographic Evidence on Legal Decisions: A Meta-Analysis.

Gruesome crime scene and autopsy photographs are admissible evidence under the Federal Rules of Evidence (FRE) if their probative value substantially outweighs their prejudicial impact. Despite important methodological differences and mixed results from past studies, recommendations from the psychological literature have been made about the prejudicial impact of gruesome photographs perhaps prematurely. This meta-analysis investigates whether there is sufficient empirical evidence that presenting gruesome photographs in a trial affects legal decisions. The analysis of 23 studies and 4868 participants shows a small but statistically significant effect of gruesome photographs increasing guilty/liable verdicts or punishments, Hedge's g = 0.143, 95% CI: [0.055, 0.232]. However, this effect is significantly, Q(1) = 8.086, p = .004, and substantially moderated by an important methodological distinction: the effect is much larger when studies compare gruesome photographs with no photographs (g = 0.450) than when they are compared with neutral photographs (g = 0.077). These results suggest that gruesome photographs do increase affirmative verdicts, both through a small effect of gruesome content as well as a larger additive of having visual material. These findings help shed light on the mixed empirical results and suggest that important additional research is needed.

Data from a pre-publication independent replication initiative examining ten moral judgement effects.

We present the data from a crowdsourced project seeking to replicate findings in independent laboratories before (rather than after) they are published. In this Pre-Publication Independent Replication (PPIR) initiative, 25 research groups attempted to replicate 10 moral judgment effects from a single laboratory's research pipeline of unpublished findings. The 10 effects were investigated using online/lab surveys containing psychological manipulations (vignettes) followed by questionnaires. Results revealed a mix of reliable, unreliable, and culturally moderated findings. Unlike any previous replication project, this dataset includes the data from not only the replications but also from the original studies, creating a unique corpus that researchers can use to better understand reproducibility and irreproducibility in science.

Political bias is tenacious.

Duarte et al. are right to worry about political bias in social psychology but they underestimate the ease of correcting it. Both liberals and conservatives show partisan bias that often worsens with cognitive sophistication. More non-liberals in social psychology is unlikely to speed our convergence upon the truth, although it may broaden the questions we ask and the data we collect.