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 …
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. This paper will succinctly …
The spread of misinformation through media and social networks threatens many aspects of society, including public health and the state of democracies. A wide range of individual-focused interventions aimed at reducing harm from online misinformation …
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 …
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 …
The spread of misinformation has become a global issue with potentially dire consequences. There has been debate over whether misinformation corrections (or" fact-checks") sometimes" backfire," causing people to become more entrenched in …
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 …
Due to the rapid growth of social media, nearly 4 billion people now have online accounts where they engage with their social network, learn about the news, and share content with other people. The rapid growth of this technology has raised important …
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 social and behavioral sciences have been increasingly using automated text analysis to measure psychological constructs in text. We explore whether GPT, the large-language model underlying the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, can be used …