The differential impact of climate interventions along the political divide in 60 countries.

A major barrier to climate change mitigation is the political polarization of climate change beliefs. In a global experiment conducted in 60 countries (N = 51,224), we assess the differential impact of eleven climate interventions across the ideological divide. At baseline, we find political polarization of climate change beliefs and policy support globally, with people who reported being liberal believing and supporting climate policy more than those who reported being conservative (Cohen's d = 0.35 and 0.27, respectively). However, we find no evidence for a statistically significant difference between these groups in their engagement in a behavioral tree planting task. This conceptual-behavioral polarization incongruence results from self-identified conservatives acting despite not believing, rather than self-identified liberals not acting on their beliefs. We also find three interventions (emphasizing effective collective actions, writing a letter to a future generation member, and writing a letter from the future self) boost climate beliefs and policy support across the ideological spectrum, and one intervention (emphasizing scientific consensus) stimulates the climate action of people identifying as liberal. None of the interventions tested show evidence for a statistically significant boost in climate action for self-identified conservatives. We discuss implications for practitioners deploying targeted climate interventions.

On the Efficacy of Accuracy Prompts Across Partisan Lines: An Adversarial Collaboration.

The spread of misinformation is a pressing societal challenge. Prior work shows that shifting attention to accuracy increases the quality of people's news-sharing decisions. However, researchers disagree on whether accuracy-prompt interventions work for U.S. Republicans/conservatives and whether partisanship moderates the effect. In this preregistered adversarial collaboration, we tested this question using a multiverse meta-analysis (k = 21; N = 27,828). In all 70 models, accuracy prompts improved sharing discernment among Republicans/conservatives. We observed significant partisan moderation for single-headline "evaluation" treatments (a critical test for one research team) such that the effect was stronger among Democrats than Republicans. However, this moderation was not consistently robust across different operationalizations of ideology/partisanship, exclusion criteria, or treatment type. Overall, we observed significant partisan moderation in 50% of specifications (all of which were considered critical for the other team). We discuss the conditions under which moderation is observed and offer interpretations.

Updating the identity-based model of belief: From false belief to the spread of misinformation.

The spread of misinformation threatens democratic societies, hampering informed decision-making. Partisan identity biases perceptions of reality, promoting false beliefs. The Identity-based Model of Political Belief explains how social identity shapes information processing and contributes to misinformation. According to this model, social identity goals can override accuracy goals, leading to belief alignment with party members rather than facts. We propose an extended version of this model that incorporates the role of informational context in misinformation belief and sharing. Partisanship involves cognitive and motivational aspects that shape party members' beliefs and actions. This includes whether they seek further evidence, where they seek that evidence, and which sources they trust. Understanding the interplay between social identity and accuracy is crucial in addressing misinformation.

The Misleading count: an identity-based intervention to counter partisan misinformation sharing.

Interventions to counter misinformation are often less effective for polarizing content on social media platforms. We sought to overcome this limitation by testing an identity-based intervention, which aims to promote accuracy by incorporating normative cues directly into the social media user interface. Across three pre-registered experiments in the US (N = 1709) and UK (N = 804), we found that crowdsourcing accuracy judgements by adding a Misleading count (next to the Like count) reduced participants' reported likelihood to share inaccurate information about partisan issues by 25% (compared with a control condition). The Misleading count was also more effective when it reflected in-group norms (from fellow Democrats/Republicans) compared with the norms of general users, though this effect was absent in a less politically polarized context (UK). Moreover, the normative intervention was roughly five times as effective as another popular misinformation intervention (i.e. the accuracy nudge reduced sharing misinformation by 5%). Extreme partisanship did not undermine the effectiveness of the intervention. Our results suggest that identity-based interventions based on the science of social norms can be more effective than identity-neutral alternatives to counter partisan misinformation in politically polarized contexts (e.g. the US). This article is part of the theme issue 'Social norm change: drivers and consequences'.

Social Media and Morality.

Nearly five billion people around the world now use social media, and this number continues to grow. One of the primary goals of social media platforms is to capture and monetize human attention. One means by which individuals and groups can capture attention and drive engagement on these platforms is by sharing morally and emotionally evocative content. We review a growing body of research on the interrelationship of social media and morality as well its consequences for individuals and society. Moral content often goes viral on social media, and social media makes moral behavior (such as punishment) less costly. Thus, social media often acts as an accelerant for existing moral dynamics, amplifying outrage, status seeking, and intergroup conflict while also potentially amplifying more constructive facets of morality, such as social support, prosociality, and collective action. We discuss trends, heated debates, and future directions in this emerging literature.

The Costs of Polarizing a Pandemic: Antecedents, Consequences, and Lessons.

Polarization has been rising in the United States of America for the past few decades and now poses a significant-and growing-public-health risk. One of the signature features of the American response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been the degree to which perceptions of risk and willingness to follow public-health recommendations have been politically polarized. Although COVID-19 has proven more lethal than any war or public-health crisis in American history, the deadly consequences of the pandemic were exacerbated by polarization. We review research detailing how every phase of the COVID-19 pandemic has been polarized, including judgments of risk, spatial distancing, mask wearing, and vaccination. We describe the role of political ideology, partisan identity, leadership, misinformation, and mass communication in this public-health crisis. We then assess the overall impact of polarization on infections, illness, and mortality during the pandemic; offer a psychological analysis of key policy questions; and identify a set of future research questions for scholars and policy experts. Our analysis suggests that the catastrophic death toll in the United States was largely preventable and due, in large part, to the polarization of the pandemic. Finally, we discuss implications for public policy to help avoid the same deadly mistakes in future public-health crises.

People Think That Social Media Platforms Do (but Should Not) Amplify Divisive Content.

Recent studies have documented the type of content that is most likely to spread widely, or go "viral," on social media, yet little is known about people's perceptions of what goes viral or what should go viral. This is critical to understand because there is widespread debate about how to improve or regulate social media algorithms. We recruited a sample of participants that is nationally representative of the U.S. population (according to age, gender, and race/ethnicity) and surveyed them about their perceptions of social media virality (n = 511). In line with prior research, people believe that divisive content, moral outrage, negative content, high-arousal content, and misinformation are all likely to go viral online. However, they reported that this type of content should not go viral on social media. Instead, people reported that many forms of positive content-such as accurate content, nuanced content, and educational content-are not likely to go viral even though they think this content should go viral. These perceptions were shared among most participants and were only weakly related to political orientation, social media usage, and demographic variables. In sum, there is broad consensus around the type of content people think social media platforms should and should not amplify, which can help inform solutions for improving social media.

The Best-Case Heuristic: Relative Optimism in Relationships, Politics, and a Global Health Pandemic.

In four experiments covering three different life domains, participants made future predictions in what they considered the most realistic scenario, an optimistic best-case scenario, or a pessimistic worst-case scenario (N = 2,900 Americans). Consistent with a best-case heuristic, participants made "realistic" predictions that were much closer to their best-case scenario than to their worst-case scenario. We found the same best-case asymmetry in health-related predictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, for romantic relationships, and a future presidential election. In a fully between-subject design (Experiment 4), realistic and best-case predictions were practically identical, and they were naturally made faster than the worst-case predictions. At least in the current study domains, the findings suggest that people generate "realistic" predictions by leaning toward their best-case scenario and largely ignoring their worst-case scenario. Although political conservatism was correlated with lower covid-related risk perception and lower support of early public-health interventions, the best-case prediction heuristic was ideologically symmetric.

Individual-level solutions may support system-level change â if they are internalized as part of one's social identity.

System-level change is crucial for solving society's most pressing problems. However, individual-level interventions may be useful for creating behavioral change before system-level change is in place and for increasing necessary public support for system-level solutions. Participating in individual-level solutions may increase support for system-level solutions - especially if the individual-level solutions are internalized as part of one's social identity.

The role of political devotion in sharing partisan misinformation and resistance to fact-checking.

Online misinformation is disproportionality created and spread by people with extreme political attitudes, especially among the far-right. There is a debate in the literature about why people spread misinformation and what should be done about it. According to the purely cognitive account, people largely spread misinformation because they are lazy, not biased. According to a motivational account, people are also motivated to believe and spread misinformation for ideological and partisan reasons. To better understand the psychological and neurocognitive processes that underlie misinformation sharing among the far-right, we conducted a cross-cultural experiment with conservatives and far-right partisans in the Unites States and Spain (N = 1,609) and a neuroimaging study with far-right partisans in Spain (N = 36). Far-right partisans in Spain and U.S. Republicans who highly identify with Trump were more likely to share misinformation than center-right voters and other Republicans, especially when the misinformation was related to sacred values (e.g., immigration). Sacred values predicted misinformation sharing above and beyond familiarity, attitude strength, and salience of the issue. Moreover, far-right partisans were unresponsive to fact-checking and accuracy nudges. At a neural level, this group showed increased activity in brain regions implicated in mentalizing and norm compliance in response to posts with sacred values. These results suggest that the two components of political devotion-identity fusion and sacred values-play a key role in misinformation sharing, highlighting the identity-affirming dimension of misinformation sharing. We discuss the need for motivational and identity-based interventions to help curb misinformation for high-risk partisan groups. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Social and moral psychology of COVID-19 across 69 countries.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all domains of human life, including the economic and social fabric of societies. One of the central strategies for managing public health throughout the pandemic has been through persuasive messaging and collective behaviour change. To help scholars better understand the social and moral psychology behind public health behaviour, we present a dataset comprising of 51,404 individuals from 69 countries. This dataset was collected for the International Collaboration on Social & Moral Psychology of COVID-19 project (ICSMP COVID-19). This social science survey invited participants around the world to complete a series of moral and psychological measures and public health attitudes about COVID-19 during an early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic (between April and June 2020). The survey included seven broad categories of questions: COVID-19 beliefs and compliance behaviours; identity and social attitudes; ideology; health and well-being; moral beliefs and motivation; personality traits; and demographic variables. We report both raw and cleaned data, along with all survey materials, data visualisations, and psychometric evaluations of key variables.

Accuracy and social motivations shape judgements of (mis)information.

The extent to which belief in (mis)information reflects lack of knowledge versus a lack of motivation to be accurate is unclear. Here, across four experiments (n = 3,364), we motivated US participants to be accurate by providing financial incentives for correct responses about the veracity of true and false political news headlines. Financial incentives improved accuracy and reduced partisan bias in judgements of headlines by about 30%, primarily by increasing the perceived accuracy of true news from the opposing party (d = 0.47). Incentivizing people to identify news that would be liked by their political allies, however, decreased accuracy. Replicating prior work, conservatives were less accurate at discerning true from false headlines than liberals, yet incentives closed the gap in accuracy between conservatives and liberals by 52%. A non-financial accuracy motivation intervention was also effective, suggesting that motivation-based interventions are scalable. Altogether, these results suggest that a substantial portion of people's judgements of the accuracy of news reflects motivational factors.

Negativity drives online news consumption.

Online media is important for society in informing and shaping opinions, hence raising the question of what drives online news consumption. Here we analyse the causal effect of negative and emotional words on news consumption using a large online dataset of viral news stories. Specifically, we conducted our analyses using a series of randomized controlled trials (N = 22,743). Our dataset comprises ~105,000 different variations of news stories from Upworthy.com that generated ∼5.7 million clicks across more than 370 million overall impressions. Although positive words were slightly more prevalent than negative words, we found that negative words in news headlines increased consumption rates (and positive words decreased consumption rates). For a headline of average length, each additional negative word increased the click-through rate by 2.3%. Our results contribute to a better understanding of why users engage with online media.

Political and nonpolitical belief change elicits behavioral change.

Beliefs have long been theorized to predict behaviors and thus have been the target of many interventions aimed at changing false beliefs in the population. But does changing beliefs translate into predictable changes in behaviors? Here, we investigated the impact of belief change on behavioral change across two experiments (N = 576). Participants rated the accuracy of a set of health-related statements and chose corresponding campaigns to which they could donate funds in an incentivized-choice task. They were then provided with relevant evidence in favor of the correct statements and against the incorrect statements. Finally, they rated the accuracy of the initial set of statements again and were given a chance to change their donation choices. We found that evidence changed beliefs and this, in turn, led to behavioral change. In a preregistered follow-up experiment, we replicated these findings with politically charged topics and found a partisan asymmetry in the effect, such that belief change triggered behavioral change only for Democrats on Democratic topics, but not for Democrats on Republican topics or for Republicans on either topic. We discuss the implications of this work in the context of interventions aimed at stimulating climate action or preventative health behaviors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

National Narcissism predicts the Belief in and the Dissemination of Conspiracy Theories During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence From 56 Countries.

Conspiracy theories related to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have propagated around the globe, leading the World Health Organization to declare the spread of misinformation an "Infodemic." We tested the hypothesis that national narcissism-a belief in the greatness of one's nation that requires external recognition-is associated with the spread of conspiracy theories during the COVID-19 pandemic. In two large-scale national surveys (NTotal = 950) conducted in the United States and the United Kingdom, and secondary analysis of data from 56 countries (N = 50,757), we found a robust, positive relationship between national narcissism and proneness to believe and disseminate conspiracy theories related to COVID-19. Furthermore, belief in COVID-19 conspiracy theories was related to less engagement in health behaviors and less support for public-health policies to combat COVID-19. Our findings illustrate the importance of social identity factors in the spread of conspiracy theories and provide insights into the psychological processes underlying the COVID-19 pandemic.

Interventions to reduce partisan animosity.

Rising partisan animosity is associated with a reduction in support for democracy and an increase in support for political violence. Here we provide a multi-level review of interventions designed to reduce partisan animosity, which we define as negative thoughts, feelings and behaviours towards a political outgroup. We introduce the TRI framework to capture three levels of intervention-thoughts (correcting misconceptions and highlighting commonalities), relationships (building dialogue skills and fostering positive contact) and institutions (changing public discourse and transforming political structures)-and connect these levels by highlighting the importance of motivation and mobilization. Our review encompasses both interventions conducted as part of academic research projects and real-world interventions led by practitioners in non-profit organizations. We also explore the challenges of durability and scalability, examine self-fulfilling polarization and interventions that backfire, and discuss future directions for reducing partisan animosity.

Parents' Political Ideology Predicts How Their Children Punish.

From an early age, children are willing to pay a personal cost to punish others for violations that do not affect them directly. Various motivations underlie such "costly punishment": People may punish to enforce cooperative norms (amplifying punishment of in-groups) or to express anger at perpetrators (amplifying punishment of out-groups). Thus, group-related values and attitudes (e.g., how much one values fairness or feels out-group hostility) likely shape the development of group-related punishment. The present experiments (N = 269, ages 3-8 from across the United States) tested whether children's punishment varies according to their parents' political ideology-a possible proxy for the value systems transmitted to children intergenerationally. As hypothesized, parents' self-reported political ideology predicted variation in the punishment behavior of their children. Specifically, parental conservatism was associated with children's punishment of out-group members, and parental liberalism was associated with children's punishment of in-group members. These findings demonstrate how differences in group-related ideologies shape punishment across generations.

How social identity shapes conspiratorial belief.

While conspiracy theories may offer benefits to those who believe in them, they can also foster intergroup conflict, threaten democracy, and undercut public health. We argue that the motivations behind conspiracy theory belief are often related to social identity. Conspiracy theories are well-positioned to fulfill social identity needs such as belongingness goals, the need to think highly of one's in-group, and the need to feel secure in one's group status. Understanding the social motives that attract people to conspiracy theories should be a focus of future research, and may be key to creating more successful interventions to reduce socially harmful conspiracy theories.

The role of generalizability in moral and political psychology.

The aim of the social and behavioral sciences is to understand human behavior across a wide array of contexts. Our theories often make sweeping claims about human nature, assuming that our ancestors or offspring will be prone to the same biases and preferences. Yet we gloss over the fact that our research is often based in a single temporal context with a limited set of stimuli. Political and moral psychology are domains in which the context and stimuli are likely to matter a great deal (Van Bavel, Mende-Siedlecki, Brady, & Reinero, 2016). In response to Yarkoni (see BBS issue), we delve into topics related to political and moral psychology that likely depend on features of the research. These topics include understanding differences between liberals and conservatives, when people are willing to sacrifice someone to save others, the behavior of political leaders, and the dynamics of intergroup conflict.