Discrediting health disinformation sources: Advantages of highlighting low expertise.

Disinformation is false information spread intentionally, and it is particularly harmful for public health. We conducted three preregistered experiments (N = 1,568) investigating how to discredit dubious health sources and disinformation attributed to them. Experiments 1 and 2 used cancer information and recruited representative U.S. samples. Participants read a vignette about a seemingly reputable source and rated their credibility. Participants were randomly assigned to a control condition or interventions that (a) corrected the source's disinformation, (b) highlighted the source's low expertise, or (c) corrected disinformation and highlighted low expertise (Experiment 2). Next, participants rated their belief in the source's disinformation claims and rerated their credibility. We found that highlighting low expertise was equivalent to (or more effective than) other interventions for reducing belief in disinformation. Highlighting low expertise was also more effective than correcting disinformation for reducing source credibility, although combining it with correcting disinformation outperformed low expertise alone (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 extended this paradigm to vaccine information in vaccinated and unvaccinated subgroups. A conflict-of-interest intervention and 1 week retention interval were also added. Highlighting low expertise was the most effective intervention in both vaccinated and unvaccinated participants for reducing belief in disinformation and source credibility. It was also the only condition where belief change was sustained over 1 week, but only in the vaccinated subgroup. In sum, highlighting a source's lack of expertise is a promising option for fact-checkers and health practitioners to reduce belief in disinformation and perceived credibility. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Preschoolers' deception related to prefrontal cortex activation: An fNIRS study.

Deception is an essential part of children's moral development. Previous developmental studies have shown that children start to deceive at the age of 3 years, and as age increased to 5 years, almost all children were able to deceive for their own benefit. Although behavioral studies have indicated that the emergence and development of deception are related to cognitive abilities, their neural correlates remain poorly understood. Therefore, the present study examined the neural correlates underlying deception in preschool-aged children (N = 89, 44 % boys, age 3.13 to 5.96 years, Han Chinese) using functional near-infrared spectroscopy. A modified hide-and-seek paradigm was applied to elicit deceptive and truth-telling behaviors. The results showed that activation of bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was positively associated with the tendency to deceive an opponent in a competitive game in the 3-year-olds. In addition, 3-year-olds who showed a high tendency to deceive showed the same brain activation in the frontopolar area as 5-year-olds did when engaged in deception, whereas no such effect was found in 3-year-olds who never engaged in deception. These findings underscore the link between preschoolers' deception and prefrontal cortex function.

Don't believe them! Reducing misinformation influence through source discreditation.

Misinformation often continues to influence people's reasoning even after it has been corrected. Therefore, an important aim of applied cognition research is to identify effective measures to counter misinformation. One frequently recommended but hitherto insufficiently tested strategy is source discreditation, that is, attacking the credibility of a misinformation source. In two experiments, we tested whether immediate source discreditation could reduce people's subsequent reliance on fictional event-related misinformation. In Experiment 1, the discreditation targeted a person source of misinformation, pointing to a conflict of interest. This intervention was compared with a commonly employed message-focused correction and a combination of correction and discreditation. The discreditation alone was effective, but less effective than a correction, with the combination of both most effective. Experiment 2 compared discreditations that targeted a person versus a media source of misinformation, pointing either to a conflict of interest or a poor track record of communication. Discreditations were effective for both types of sources, although track-record discreditations were less effective when the misinformation source was a media outlet compared to a person. Results demonstrate that continued influence of misinformation is shaped by social as well as cognitive factors and that source discreditation is a broadly applicable misinformation countermeasure.

Correcting fake news headlines after repeated exposure: memory and belief accuracy in younger and older adults.

The efficacy of fake news corrections in improving memory and belief accuracy may depend on how often adults see false information before it is corrected. Two experiments tested the competing predictions that repeating fake news before corrections will either impair or improve memory and belief accuracy. These experiments also examined whether fake news exposure effects would differ for younger and older adults due to age-related differences in the recollection of contextual details. Younger and older adults read real and fake news headlines that appeared once or thrice. Next, they identified fake news corrections among real news headlines. Later, recognition and cued recall tests assessed memory for real news, fake news, if corrections occurred, and beliefs in retrieved details. Repeating fake news increased detection and remembering of corrections, correct real news retrieval, and erroneous fake news retrieval. No age differences emerged for detection of corrections, but younger adults remembered corrections better than older adults. At test, correct fake news retrieval for earlier-detected corrections was associated with better real news retrieval. This benefit did not differ between age groups in recognition but was greater for younger than older adults in cued recall. When detected corrections were not remembered at test, repeated fake news increased memory errors. Overall, both age groups believed correctly retrieved real news more than erroneously retrieved fake news to a similar degree. These findings suggest that fake news repetition effects on subsequent memory accuracy depended on age differences in recollection-based retrieval of fake news and that it was corrected.

Goalkeepers benefit from using deceptive actions in the soccer penalty kick.

Most studies on deception in soccer penalty kicks have focused on the deceptive actions used by penalty takers. However, it is worth noting that deception can also be played out by goalkeepers. To examine the effectiveness of goalkeepers' deceptive actions in professional competition, we analysed 714 penalty kicks taken during matches in the English Premier League and German Bundesliga, spanning the seasons from 2016-2017 to 2019-2020. We scored whether goalkeepers used deception, and if so, what type of deception, the outcome of the penalty and the kicking strategy of the penalty taker. The results showed that goalkeepers used deception in half of the penalty kicks, resulting in significantly less goals compared to penalties without deception. This advantage was similar for the different types of deception, but larger when penalty takers paid attention to goalkeepers. We propose that the deceptive actions by goalkeepers are effective, mainly because it leads the penalty taker to lose focus. The practical implications of these findings are discussed for both goalkeepers and penalty takers.

Strategies and bottlenecks to tackle infodemic in public health: a scoping review.

Background: The World Health Organization defines "infodemic" as the phenomenon of an uncontrolled spread of information in digital and physical environments during a disease outbreak, causing confusion and risk-taking behaviors that can harm health. The aim of this scoping review is to examine international evidence and identify strategies and bottlenecks to tackle health-related fake news. Methods: We performed a scoping review of the literature from 1 January 2018 to 26 January 2023 on PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus electronic databases. We also performed a search of grey literature on institutional websites. The research question has been defined according to the PCC (population, concept, and context) mnemonic for constructing research questions in scoping reviews. Results: The overall research in the scientific databases yielded a total of 5,516 records. After removing duplicates, and screening the titles, abstracts, and full texts, we included 21 articles from scientific literature. Moreover, 5 documents were retrieved from institutional websites. Based on their content, we decided to group recommendations and bottlenecks into five different and well-defined areas of intervention, which we called strategies: "foster proper communication through the collaboration between science and social media companies and users," "institutional and regulatory interventions," "check and debunking," "increase health literacy," and "surveillance and monitoring through new digital tools." Conclusion: The multidisciplinary creation of standardized toolkits that collect recommendations from the literature and institutions can provide a valid solution to limit the infodemic, increasing the health education of both citizens and health professionals, providing the knowledge to recognize fake news, as well as supporting the creation and validation of AI tools aimed at prebunking and debunking.

Different neural correlates of deception: Crafting high and low creative scams.

Deception is a complex social behavior that manifests in various forms, including scams. To successfully deceive victims, liars have to continually devise novel scams. This ability to create novel scams represents one kind of malevolent creativity, referred to as lying. This study aimed to explore different neural substrates involved in the generation of high and low creative scams. A total of 40 participants were required to design several creative scams, and their cortical activity was recorded by functional near-infrared spectroscopy. The results revealed that the right frontopolar cortex (FPC) was significantly active in scam generation. This region associated with theory of mind may be a key region for creating novel and complex scams. Moreover, creativity-related regions were positively involved in creative scams, while morality-related areas showed negative involvement. This suggests that individuals might attempt to use malevolent creativity while simultaneously minimizing the influence of moral considerations. The right FPC exhibited increased coupling with the right precentral gyrus during the design of high-harmfulness scams, suggesting a diminished control over immoral thoughts in the generation of harmful scams. Additionally, the perception of the victim's emotions (related to right pre-motor cortex) might diminish the quality of highly original scams. Furthermore, an efficient and cohesive neural coupling state appears to be a key factor in generating high-creativity scams. These findings suggest that the right FPC was crucial in scam creation, highlighting a neural basis for balancing malevolent creativity against moral considerations in high-creativity deception.

Building a framework for fake news detection in the health domain.

Disinformation in the medical field is a growing problem that carries a significant risk. Therefore, it is crucial to detect and combat it effectively. In this article, we provide three elements to aid in this fight: 1) a new framework that collects health-related articles from verification entities and facilitates their check-worthiness and fact-checking annotation at the sentence level; 2) a corpus generated using this framework, composed of 10335 sentences annotated in these two concepts and grouped into 327 articles, which we call KEANE (faKe nEws At seNtence lEvel); and 3) a new model for verifying fake news that combines specific identifiers of the medical domain with triplets subject-predicate-object, using Transformers and feedforward neural networks at the sentence level. This model predicts the fact-checking of sentences and evaluates the veracity of the entire article. After training this model on our corpus, we achieved remarkable results in the binary classification of sentences (check-worthiness F1: 0.749, fact-checking F1: 0.698) and in the final classification of complete articles (F1: 0.703). We also tested its performance against another public dataset and found that it performed better than most systems evaluated on that dataset. Moreover, the corpus we provide differs from other existing corpora in its duality of sentence-article annotation, which can provide an additional level of justification of the prediction of truth or untruth made by the model.

Reasons for academic cheating in a cohort of nursing students in Saudi Arabia: a cross-sectional study.

This cross-sectional study investigated the reasons behind academic cheating in a cohort of nursing students in Saudi Arabia. The study involved 482 nursing students from two government universities in Riyadh. We used a newly developed self-reported questionnaire called the Reasons for Cheating Scale (RCS) to collect data. The highest-scoring reasons for academic cheating in the study population included the desire to obtain high grades, encouragement from friends to cheat, and the perception that exams were too difficult. Male students scored significantly higher than female students for reasons such as not understanding the course material, unclear test questions and instructions, pressure from families to excel, difficulty of the course material, and ignorance of effective study methods (P < 0.05). Age also had a role, as students aged 15-20 years had significantly higher scores for the item "Exams are too hard", whereas those aged ≥25 years had higher scores for "Difficulty of the course material" (P < 0.05). Additionally, students in the preparatory year had significantly higher scores than those in other years for reasons such as difficult exams, unclear test questions and instructions, fear of failing, difficulty of the course material, and the desire to please their families (P < 0.05). Overall, the desire to obtain high grades emerged as the main reason for academic cheating in our cohort of nursing students in Saudi Arabia. The findings suggest that sociodemographic characteristics, including sex, age, and academic year, should be considered when addressing the issue of cheating among nursing students.

Relations among lie-telling self-efficacy, moral disengagement, and willingness to tell antisocial lies among children and adolescents.

This study examined a proposed model of relations among lie-telling self-efficacy, moral disengagement, and willingness to tell antisocial lies among children and adolescents. Children and adolescents aged 6 to 15 years completed measures of lie-telling self-efficacy and moral disengagement. They also read vignettes about a character committing a transgression and telling a lie to conceal the transgression. For each vignette, children and adolescents made a hypothetical decision about telling the truth or a lie if they were in the character's position to assess their lie-telling propensity. Lie-telling self-efficacy was related to willingness to tell lies, and this relationship was mediated by moral disengagement. Children and adolescents with higher lie-telling self-efficacy had higher moral disengagement, and those who had higher moral disengagement were more willing to tell antisocial lies. Overall, results support Bandura's social cognitive theory as a framework for understanding the psychosocial mechanisms underlying attitudes toward lie-telling. Moreover, these findings suggest that interventions to address problematic lie-telling behavior should focus on children's and adolescents' use of moral disengagement mechanisms.

Advanced theory of mind and children's prosocial lie-telling in middle childhood: A training study.

Children's advanced theory of mind (AToM) is concurrently associated with their prosocial lie-telling. However, the causal link between AToM and prosocial lie-telling has not yet been demonstrated. To address this gap, the current study adopted a training paradigm and investigated the role of AToM in children's prosocial lie-telling in middle childhood. A total of 66 9- and 10-year-old children who did not demonstrate any prosocial lie-telling in a disappointment gift paradigm at the baseline were recruited and randomly assigned to either the experimental group (n = 32) or an active control group (n = 34). The experimental group underwent a conversation-based training program of four sessions. The results showed significantly greater gains in AToM at the posttest for the experimental group children compared with the control group children, controlling for family socioeconomic status, children's literacy score, working memory, and inhibition. More important, the experimental group children were more likely to tell prosocial lies than the control group, even after controlling for the pretest AToM and other covariates. However, the training effects faded at the 6-month follow-up test after the training's completion. These findings provide the first evidence for the causal role of AToM in the development of prosocial lie-telling in middle childhood. The fade-out effect is discussed in the context of educational interventions.

[The lie: Hiding to tell, telling to hide]. / Le mensonge : cacher pour dire, dire pour cacher.

We all lie. Some more than others, and others still have made it a way of life in relationships. There is a fine line between the normal and the pathological. It is certainly more psychologically comfortable to side with the truth than with lies. So what is it that drives the liar to stick to his guns?

Deception abilities emerged in large language models.

Large language models (LLMs) are currently at the forefront of intertwining AI systems with human communication and everyday life. Thus, aligning them with human values is of great importance. However, given the steady increase in reasoning abilities, future LLMs are under suspicion of becoming able to deceive human operators and utilizing this ability to bypass monitoring efforts. As a prerequisite to this, LLMs need to possess a conceptual understanding of deception strategies. This study reveals that such strategies emerged in state-of-the-art LLMs, but were nonexistent in earlier LLMs. We conduct a series of experiments showing that state-of-the-art LLMs are able to understand and induce false beliefs in other agents, that their performance in complex deception scenarios can be amplified utilizing chain-of-thought reasoning, and that eliciting Machiavellianism in LLMs can trigger misaligned deceptive behavior. GPT-4, for instance, exhibits deceptive behavior in simple test scenarios 99.16% of the time (P < 0.001). In complex second-order deception test scenarios where the aim is to mislead someone who expects to be deceived, GPT-4 resorts to deceptive behavior 71.46% of the time (P < 0.001) when augmented with chain-of-thought reasoning. In sum, revealing hitherto unknown machine behavior in LLMs, our study contributes to the nascent field of machine psychology.

Determinants of users' unverified information sharing on social media platforms: A herding behavior perspective.

The proliferation of unverified or false information by irresponsible users can significantly amplify the spread of misinformation or fake news. Despite growing research on unverified information sharing, a comprehensive understanding of the varying influences of different factors and strategies to mitigate this issue remains under investigation. To address this research gap, this study, rooted in the theory of herd behavior, develops, and tests a model theorizing the reasons behind social media users' unverified information sharing. Data was collected from 510 respondents across six regions of China using a convenience sampling method. The collected data was analyzed using Mplus. The results from this study indicated that perceived severity, state uncertainty, and herding have a significant positive influence on unverified information sharing. These results enrich the understanding of unverified information-sharing behavior among Chinese social media users. Drawing from these results, we suggest platform administrators and policymakers mitigate herd behavior tendencies and stem the spread of misinformation by disseminating timely, accurate, and authoritative information. Since this action will reduce users' perceptions of severity and uncertainty. Social media users are also advised to stay vigilant over the implications of herd behavior and foster a more critical attitude towards information sharing.

Development and validation of a questionnaire about reasons for academic cheating by nursing students: A cross-sectional study.

Cheating behavior is spreading among nursing students worldwide, necessitating the development of a validated questionnaire evaluating the reasons for such behavior. Nursing students (N = 482) from 2 universities in Saudi Arabia participated in this observational study. A survey containing items on socio-demographics and the 33-item Reasons for Cheating Scale (RCS) was completed by the respondents. The RCS had a 1-factor structure; the model fit indices were similar between the 1-, 2-, and 3-factor models, but the inter-factor correlations were too high for the 2- and 3-factor models. The measures of the quality of the factor score estimates were as follows: factor determinacy index, 0.987; expected a posteriori marginal reliability, 0.974; sensitivity ratio, 6.178; and expected percentage of true differences, 97.3%. The measures of the closeness to unidimensionality for the overall RCS were as follows: unidimensional congruence, 0.957; explained common variance, 0.875; and mean item residual absolute loading, 0.223. The intraclass correlation coefficient and McDonald's omega were 0.96 (CI: 0.93-0.98) and 0.962 (95% CI: 0.958-0.967), respectively. The severity score, infit, and outfit ranged from -0.847 to -2.015, 0.813 to 1.742, and 0.837 to 1.661, respectively. For all RCS items, the thresholds ranked τi1 < τi2 < τi3 < τi4 and showed invariance between the sexes. The RCS showed robust psychometric validity for both classical and item response theory parameters. It also had excellent test-retest reliability, internal consistency, item discrimination, factorial validity, measurement invariance, and ordered threshold level for the responses. Therefore, the RCS is a valid and reliable tool for assessing cheating behavior among nursing students.