Battling the coronavirus 'infodemic' among social media users in Kenya and Nigeria.

How can we induce social media users to be discerning when sharing information during a pandemic? An experiment on Facebook Messenger with users from Kenya (n = 7,498) and Nigeria (n = 7,794) tested interventions designed to decrease intentions to share COVID-19 misinformation without decreasing intentions to share factual posts. The initial stage of the study incorporated: (1) a factorial design with 40 intervention combinations; and (2) a contextual adaptive design, increasing the probability of assignment to treatments that worked better for previous subjects with similar characteristics. The second stage evaluated the best-performing treatments and a targeted treatment assignment policy estimated from the data. We precisely estimate null effects from warning flags and related article suggestions, tactics used by social media platforms. However, nudges to consider the accuracy of information reduced misinformation sharing relative to control by 4.9% (estimate = -2.3 percentage points, 95% CI = [-4.2, -0.35]). Such low-cost scalable interventions may improve the quality of information circulating online.

Emotion may predict susceptibility to fake news but emotion regulation does not seem to help.

Misinformation is a serious concern for societies across the globe. To design effective interventions to combat the belief in and spread of misinformation, we must understand which psychological processes influence susceptibility to misinformation. This paper tests the widely assumed - but largely untested - claim that emotionally provocative headlines are associated with worse ability to identify true versus false headlines. Consistent with this proposal, we found correlational evidence that overall emotional response at the headline level is associated with diminished truth discernment, except for experienced anger which was associated with increased truth discernment. The second set of studies tested a popular emotion regulation intervention where people were asked to apply either emotional suppression or emotion reappraisal techniques when considering the veracity of several headlines. In contrast to the correlation results, we found no evidence that emotion regulation helped people distinguish false from true news headlines.

"If we move, it moves with us:" Physical distancing in Africa during COVID-19.

Health behaviors to prevent the spread of infectious diseases are often subject to collective action problems, and social norms can play an important role in inducing compliance. In this paper, we study knowledge, beliefs, and behavior related to one such practice during the COVID-19 pandemic - physical distancing - using an online survey of social media users in Kenya, Nigeria, and Uganda. We find that, while there is widespread knowledge that physical distancing reduces the spread of the virus, respondents underestimate their peers' support for policies designed to enforce physical distancing, expect others not to practice physical distancing, and do not maintain physical distance themselves. However, more than half of respondents wrote a message to encourage others to practice physical distancing. Findings from survey experiments suggest that making salient the social and material costs for not keeping physical distance were insufficient to encourage compliance, suggestive of the absence of a social norm of physical distancing at the time. Given the large gap between own attitudes and expectations of others' attitudes toward lockdown policies, we propose that providing information on the extent of public support for physical distancing in citizens' own words may encourage compliance in the future.