Abstract
Some recent psychology research has shown why people engage in deceptive behavior, and how we can prevent them from doing so. Given the alarming amount of fake news in the US public sphere, a group of psychologists has sought to combine the available research in a proposed intervention, the Pro-Truth Pledge, to help address this problem. The pledge asks signees to commit to 12 behaviors that research in psychology shows correlate with an orientation toward truthfulness. Early results show both that private citizens and public figures are willing to take the pledge, and initial survey, interview, and observational evidence shows the effectiveness of the pledge on reducing sharing misinformation on social media.
Highlights
A Psychological Approach to Promoting Truth in PoliticsMulickc [a] Decision Sciences Collaborative, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA
Some recent psychology research has shown why people engage in deceptive behavior, and how we can prevent them from doing so
Memes, videos, tweets, and other misinformation, a category that has recently been termed “viral deception” by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, are sweeping social media, shared by ordinary citizens (The Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, 2017). The impact of such viral deception, together with extensive misinformation spread by high-profile political figures during the 2016 US presidential campaign and the “Vote Leave” campaign in the UK Brexit referendum, have caused the venerable Oxford Dictionary to choose as the 2016 word of the year post-truth, “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief (“Word of the year 2016 is...,” 2016).”
Summary
Mulickc [a] Decision Sciences Collaborative, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA. [b] Department of Social Sciences, University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany. [c] Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA
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