Economic segregation is associated with reduced concerns about economic inequality.

Economic segregation is the geographical separation of people with different economic means. In this paper, we employ an archival study of attitudes in regions with varying degrees of economic segregation and a series of experimental studies measuring reactions to hypothetical levels of segregation to examine how segregation affects concerns about inequality. Combining correlational and experimental methods and examining attitudes about economic inequality in both the United States and South Africa, we show that when individuals of different means are segregated from each other, people are less likely to engage in economic comparisons and are therefore less concerned by inequality. Moreover, we find that this is true even when people are exposed to (and are aware of) the same levels of inequality, suggesting that segregation in and of itself affects attitudes about inequality. Our findings highlight the importance of economic segregation in shaping public attitudes about organizational and societal economic inequality.

Tribalism and tribulations: The social costs of not sharing fake news.

Fake news can foster political polarization, foment division between groups, and encourage malicious behavior. Misinformation has cast doubt on the integrity of democratic elections, downplayed the seriousness of COVID-19, and increased vaccine hesitancy. Given the leading role that online groups play in the dissemination of fake news, in this research we examined how group-level factors contribute to sharing misinformation. By unobtrusively tracking interactions among 51,537 Twitter user dyads longitudinally over two time periods (n = 103,074), we found that group members who did not conform to the behavior of other group members by sharing fake news were subjected to reduced social interaction over time. We augmented this unique, ecologically valid behavioral data with another digital field study (N = 178,411) and five experiments to disentangle some of the causal mechanisms driving the observed effects. We found that social costs were higher for not sharing fake news versus other content, that specific types of deviant group members faced the greatest social costs, and that social costs explained fake news sharing above and beyond partisan identity and subjective accuracy assessments. Overall, our work illuminates the role of conformity pressure as a critical antecedent of the spread of misinformation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Hiring women into senior leadership positions is associated with a reduction in gender stereotypes in organizational language.

Women continue to be underrepresented in leadership positions. This underrepresentation is at least partly driven by gender stereotypes that associate men, but not women, with achievement-oriented, agentic traits (e.g., assertive and decisive). These stereotypes are expressed and perpetuated in language, with women being described in less agentic terms than men. The present research suggests that appointing women to the top tiers of management can mitigate these deep-rooted stereotypes that are expressed in language. We use natural language processing techniques to analyze over 43,000 documents containing 1.23 billion words, finding that hiring female chief executive officers and board members is associated with changes in organizations' use of language, such that the semantic meaning of being a woman becomes more similar to the semantic meaning of agency. In other words, hiring women into leadership positions helps to associate women with characteristics that are critical for leadership success. Importantly, our findings suggest that changing organizational language through increasing female representation might provide a path for women to break out of the double bind: when female leaders are appointed into positions of power, women are more strongly associated with the positive aspects of agency (e.g., independent and confident) in language but not at the cost of a reduced association with communality (e.g., kind and caring). Taken together, our findings suggest that female representation is not merely an end, but also a means to systemically change insidious gender stereotypes and overcome the trade-off between women being perceived as either competent or likeable.

Of pandemics, politics, and personality: The role of conscientiousness and political ideology in the sharing of fake news.

Sharing misinformation can be catastrophic, especially during times of national importance. Typically studied in political contexts, the sharing of fake news has been positively linked with conservative political ideology. However, such sweeping generalizations run the risk of increasing already rampant political polarization. We offer a more nuanced account by proposing that the sharing of fake news is largely driven by low conscientiousness conservatives. At high levels of conscientiousness there is no difference between liberals and conservatives. We find support for our hypotheses in the contexts of COVID-19, political, and neutral news across eight studies (six preregistered; two conceptual replications) with 4,642 participants and 91,144 unique participant-news observations. A general desire for chaos explains the interactive effect of political ideology and conscientiousness on the sharing of fake news. Furthermore, our findings indicate the inadequacy of fact-checker interventions to deter the spread of fake news. This underscores the challenges associated with tackling fake news, especially during a crisis like COVID-19 where misinformation impairs the ability of governments to curtail the pandemic. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).