More than half of the world’s population uses social media. There is widespread debate among the public, politicians, and academics about social media’s impact on important outcomes, such as intergroup conflict and well-being. However, most prior …
AI chatbots have been shown to be successful tools for persuasion. However, people may prefer to use chatbots that validate, rather than challenge, their pre-existing beliefs. This preference for “sycophantic” (or overly agreeable and validating) …
Why do some ideas spread widely, while others fail to catch on? We review the psychology of information spread, or the psychology of “virality.” Similar types of information tend to spread in many contexts, both online and offline. This is likely …
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 …
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 …
Understanding how vaccine hesitancy relates to online behavior is crucial for addressing current and future disease outbreaks. We combined survey data measuring attitudes toward the COVID-19 vaccine with Twitter data in two studies (N1 = 464 Twitter …