I'm not someone who publishes papers in Nature. I'm just not.
And it's not just this paper, of course. This is just the thing that caused me to reflect on my life and how absolutely bonkers this all still is for me.
First, I need to give props to @DG_Rand. He is an absolute hero. You know how some PI's just slap their name on work that has been done by junior collaborators? Not Dave. If anything, he takes LESS credit than he deserves. He's also just the best person.
But, anyway, back to me
I grew up on a farm in northern Saskatchewan. It failed & forced my parents to work several jobs. As a kid, I (and my 4 siblings) helped my parents do janitorial work from Grade 1 to Grade 9. This was not at all abnormal to me: On a farm you do chores, so that became our chores.
There has been a surge of behavioral research on misinformation & "fake news". To synthesize things, @DG_Rand & I wrote a systematic review: psyarxiv.com/ar96c
We take a cognitive/social psych perspective, but we tried to cast a wide net for the review. Feedback welcome!
Sorry to those who retweeted an earlier version of this tweet that I deleted because the image preview was too zoomed in
There's too much in the review to cover in a tweet thread, but here are some of the take-aways that we thought to be particularly important...
We're likely to face an unprecedented situation where the incumbent refuses to concede. Although it may not be necessary, things would certainly be easier if Republicans viewed the election as legitimate.
How uphill of a battle will this be? Well, I ran a study with @DG_Rand...
Study was run on Prolific & Lucid on Friday. In total, we have 509 Biden voters & 218 Trump voters. The samples are *not* nationally representative and a bit small. But, some fairly clear results came out.
A key initial Q is about people's priors. Do Trump voters believe it is *unlikely* that Biden won?
The answer is yes.
Reminder: This study was run on Friday when Biden was already well ahead & very likely to win. That he would win the popular vote was *never* in question.
The following may be of interest to those who use Prolific and/or Lucid for surveys.
Ran a study yesterday about election-related opinions (plus some other stuff - data is a bit depressing, coming tomorrow) using Lucid & Prolific's "nationally representative" sample function...
Both sources use quota-matching to filter people into studies who match U.S. demo's on age, gender, ethnicity, and (for Lucid) region. However, there were some notable differences and similarities between the samples.
(Note: Target N for each was 500, study was ~10 min long.)
I included a very simple initial attention/bot check: "Puppy is to dog as kitten is to _____?" with an open-ended text box to respond. This came at the very start. Two other fairly simple attention checks came later in the survey. We also asked directly if ppl responded randomly.
I do hope that someone is keeping a list of elected Republicans who a) supported Trump's baseless attacks on US democracy, b) said nothing, or c) repudiated him.
And for (c), if they did so *before* the election was called for Biden or after
Our paper "Fighting COVID-19 misinformation on social media: Experimental evidence for a scalable accuracy nudge intervention" is now in press at Psych Science!
I’m super proud of this paper - but first, a thread on the results.
A key question is why people share misinformation on social media in the first place. If we can understand this, we might be able to develop interventions to slow it down. This becomes increasingly important in the context of a global pandemic.