Category: Featured Database

Author: Hamill, M. E.; Hernandez, M. C.; Bailey, K. R.; Zielinski, M. D.; Matos, M. A. & Schiller, H. J. Description: Over the last 30 years, public opinion and state level legislation regarding the concealed-carry of firearms have shifted dramatically. Previous studies of potential effects have yielded mixed results, making policy recommendations difficult. We investigated whether liberalization of state level concealed-carry legislation was associated with a change in the rates of homicide or other violent crime. Data on violent crime and homicide rates were collected from the US Department of…

Author: Rosati, A. G.; Hagberg, L.; Enigk, D. K.; Otali, E.; Emery Thompson, M.; Muller, M. N.; Wrangham, R. W. & Machanda, Z. P. Description: Humans prioritize close, positive relationships during aging, and socioemotional selectivity theory proposes that this shift causally depends on capacities for thinking about personal future time horizons. To examine this theory, we tested for key elements of human social aging in longitudinal data on wild chimpanzees. Aging male chimpanzees have more mutual friendships characterized by high, equitable investment, whereas younger males have more one-sided relationships. Older…

Author: Pennycook, G. & Rand, D. G. Description: Reducing the spread of misinformation, especially on social media, is a major challenge. We investigate one potential approach: having social media platform algorithms preferentially display content from news sources that users rate as trustworthy. To do so, we ask whether crowdsourced trust ratings can effectively differentiate more versus less reliable sources. We ran two preregistered experiments ( = 1,010 from Mechanical Turk and = 970 from Lucid) where individuals rated familiarity with, and trust in, 60 news sources from three categories: (…

Author: Bennett, W. L. & Livingston, S. Description: Many democratic nations are experiencing increased levels of false information circulating through social media and political websites that mimic journalism formats. In many cases, this disinformation is associated with the efforts of movements and parties on the radical right to mobilize supporters against centre parties and the mainstream press that carries their messages. The spread of disinformation can be traced to growing legitimacy problems in many democracies. Declining citizen confidence in institutions undermines the credibility of official information in the news and…

Author: Effron, D. A. & Raj, M. Description: People may repeatedly encounter the same misinformation when it “goes viral.” The results of four main experiments (two preregistered) and a pilot experiment (total = 2,587) suggest that repeatedly encountering misinformation makes it seem less unethical to spread-regardless of whether one believes it. Seeing a fake-news headline one or four times reduced how unethical participants thought it was to publish and share that headline when they saw it again-even when it was clearly labeled as false and participants disbelieved it, and even…

Author: Buchanan, T. Description: Individuals who encounter false information on social media may actively spread it further, by sharing or otherwise engaging with it. Much of the spread of disinformation can thus be attributed to human action. Four studies (total N = 2,634) explored the effect of message attributes (authoritativeness of source, consensus indicators), viewer characteristics (digital literacy, personality, and demographic variables) and their interaction (consistency between message and recipient beliefs) on self-reported likelihood of spreading examples of disinformation. Participants also reported whether they had shared real-world disinformation in the…

Author: Broniatowski, D. A.; Jamison, A. M.; Qi, S.; AlKulaib, L.; Chen, T.; Benton, A.; Quinn, S. C. & Dredze, M. Description: To understand how Twitter bots and trolls (“bots”) promote online health content. We compared bots’ to average users’ rates of vaccine-relevant messages, which we collected online from July 2014 through September 2017. We estimated the likelihood that users were bots, comparing proportions of polarized and antivaccine tweets across user types. We conducted a content analysis of a Twitter hashtag associated with Russian troll activity. Compared with average users,…

Author: Shao, C.; Ciampaglia, G. L.; Varol, O.; Yang, K.-C.; Flammini, A. & Menczer, F. Description: The massive spread of digital misinformation has been identified as a major threat to democracies. Communication, cognitive, social, and computer scientists are studying the complex causes for the viral diffusion of misinformation, while online platforms are beginning to deploy countermeasures. Little systematic, data-based evidence has been published to guide these efforts. Here we analyze 14 million messages spreading 400 thousand articles on Twitter during ten months in 2016 and 2017. We find evidence that…

Author: Shakya, H. B., & Christakis, N. A. Description: Face-to-face social interactions enhance well-being. With the ubiquity of social media, important questions have arisen about the impact of online social interactions. In the present study, we assessed the associations of both online and offline social networks with several subjective measures of well-being. We used 3 waves (2013, 2014, and 2015) of data from 5,208 subjects in the nationally representative Gallup Panel Social Network Study survey, including social network measures, in combination with objective measures of Facebook use. We investigated the…

Author: Wang, F.; Sun, X. Description: Power has long been linked to the stigma of corruption. Three studies indicated that different power concepts have different implications for corruption behavior and perception. The personalized power concept relates to using power to pursue self-centered goals for one’s own benefit, whereas the socialized power concept relates to using power to pursue other-focused goals for benefiting and helping others. Three studies were conducted to explore the effect of these two types of power concepts on corrupt intention or practice. The power concepts were measured…