Self-certification: A novel method for increasing sharing discernment on social media.

The proliferation of misinformation on social media platforms has given rise to growing demands for effective intervention strategies that increase sharing discernment (i.e. increase the difference in the probability of sharing true posts relative to the probability of sharing false posts). One suggested method is to encourage users to deliberate on the veracity of the information prior to sharing. However, this strategy is undermined by individuals' propensity to share posts they acknowledge as false. In our study, across three experiments, in a simulated social media environment, participants were shown social media posts and asked whether they wished to share them and, sometimes, whether they believed the posts to be truthful. We observe that requiring users to verify their belief in a news post's truthfulness before sharing it markedly curtails the dissemination of false information. Thus, requiring self-certification increased sharing discernment. Importantly, requiring self-certification didn't hinder users from sharing content they genuinely believed to be true because participants were allowed to share any posts that they indicated were true. We propose self-certification as a method that substantially curbs the spread of misleading content on social media without infringing upon the principle of free speech.

ChatGPT's advice is perceived as better than that of professional advice columnists.

ChatGPT is a high-performance large language model that has the potential to significantly improve human-computer interactions. It can provide advice on a range of topics, but it is unclear how good this advice is relative to that provided by competent humans, especially in situations where empathy is required. Here, we report the first investigation of whether ChatGPT's responses are perceived as better than those of humans in a task where humans were attempting to be empathetic. Fifty social dilemma questions were randomly selected from 10 well-known advice columns. In a pre-registered survey, participants (N = 404) were each shown one question, along with the corresponding response by an advice columnist and by ChatGPT. ChatGPT's advice was perceived as more balanced, complete, empathetic, helpful, and better than the advice provided by professional advice columnists (all values of p < 0.001). Although participants could not determine which response was written by ChatGPT (54%, p = 0.29), most participants preferred that their own social dilemma questions be answered by a human than by a computer (77%, p < 0.001). ChatGPT's responses were longer than those produced by the advice columnists (mean 280.9 words vs. 142.2 words, p < 0.001). In a second pre-registered survey, each ChatGPT answer was constrained to be approximately the same length as that of the advice columnist (mean 143.2 vs. 142.2 words, p = 0.95). This survey (N = 401) replicated the above findings, showing that the benefit of ChatGPT was not solely due to it writing longer answers.

Attribute Amnesia in the Auditory Domain.

Individuals are often unable to report an attribute of an object to which they recently attended, if they expected to report a different attribute, a phenomenon known as attribute amnesia (AA). To date, all AA studies have occurred in the visual domain. The purpose of this study was to explore the boundary conditions of AA by testing if AA also occurs in the auditory domain and, if so, for which attributes. It was found that AA was present when reporting the location (p = .003) and the number of tones (p < .001) of an auditory stimulus, but not when reporting its pitch (p = .383). These findings can be understood in terms of the organisation of the primary cortical areas and help explain the differences between visual working memory and auditory working memory.