Moral leniency towards belief-consistent disinformation may help explain its spread on social media.

The spread of false and misleading information on social media is largely dependent on human action. Understanding the factors that lead social media users to amplify (or indeed intervene in) the spread of this content is an ongoing challenge. Prior research suggests that users are not only more likely to interact with misinformation that supports their ideology or their political beliefs, they may also feel it is more acceptable to spread. However, less is known about the influence of newer, issue-specific beliefs. Two online studies explored the relationship between the degree of belief-consistency of disinformation on users' moral judgements and intentions to spread disinformation further. Four disinformation narratives were presented: disinformation that supported or undermined the UK Government's handling of COVID-19, and disinformation that minimised or maximised the perceived risk of COVID-19. A novel scale for measuring intentions to contribute to the spread of social media content was also used in study 2. Participants reported greater likelihood of spreading false material that was consistent with their beliefs. More lenient moral judgements related to the degree of belief-consistency with disinformation, even when participants were aware the material was false or misleading. These moral judgements partially mediated the relationship between belief-consistency of content and intentions to spread it further on social media. While people are concerned about the spread of disinformation generally, they may evaluate belief-consistent disinformation differently from others in a way that permits them to spread it further. As social media platforms prioritise the ordering of feeds based on personal relevance, there is a risk that users could be being presented with disinformation that they are more tolerant of.

Fewer but better: Proportionate size of the group affects evaluation of transgressive leaders.

A group may be badly affected if its leader transgresses important rules. Nonetheless, an emerging body of evidence suggests that in intergroup contexts, group members apply a double standard when judging ingroup leaders - They respond less punitively to transgressions by their leader than by non-leaders. In this article, two experiments investigated how proportionate ingroup size affects reactions to transgressive ingroup leaders. We demonstrate that ingroup leaders from larger, but not smaller, groups benefit from the double standard. The experiments testing the effects of two different types of transgressions (nepotistic favouritism and corruption, respectively) show that transgressive leaders from larger groups are evaluated more positively than both comparable non-leaders and leaders from smaller groups. In contrast, transgressive leaders from smaller groups are evaluated similarly to comparable transgressive non-leaders. Experiment 2 investigated a potential explanation for this phenomenon. Faced with a transgressive leader, members of a smaller group report greater embarrassment than do members of larger groups in relation to the leaders' actions. Implications of these findings and directions for future research are discussed.