🚨New WP🚨

Conspiracy believers often claim to 'think for themselves', but do they really?

No. They use social information as much as other participants in advice-taking tasks while *reporting* relying less on social information (N = 864 in 🇬🇧&🇵🇰).

👉 psyarxiv.com/3xv8s

Why do people moralize harmless pleasures, e.g. drugs, gluttony, masturbation, & lack of self-control? In our new Behav. Brain. Sci. target article, we argue that cooperation-based theories of morality can explain these Purity values.
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w/Jean-Baptiste André&NBaumard
tinyurl.com/53xm24ax

Draft schedule now live for our workshop on successful deliberation delibot.xyz/schedule-d4g/ keynotes from
- Jon Roozenbeek
- Mevan Babakar | مێڤان
- Sacha Altay
- Ekaterina Kochmar
- Shauna Concannon

Cambridge 14th October and it's FREE if you register by 28th Sept docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAI…

#APSA22 basketball fans, is anyone interested in watching the final of the Eurobasket on Sunday (2:30pm)?

(I'll probably head to a sport pub)

At #APSA2022 , Sacha Altay asks whether there really was a dramatic 'infodemic' during the pandemic? The answer is 'no'.

In fact, people turned towards more trustworthy news sources. 1/6

Here’s Sacha Altay at #APSA2022 presenting our study of how news use changed during the pandemic in 🇫🇷🇩🇪🇬🇧🇺🇸. We found that increase in news use mainly benefitted trustworthy news sites – but more mixed picture on Facebook. More details: twitter.com/Sacha_Altay/st…

Twitter friends, I’ll soon arrive in Montreal (15-19 Sep) and Boston (19-25 Sep). Get in touch if you want to chat ☕️🍻😊

For those going to #APSA2022 , I'll be presenting our paper quantifying the 'infodemic' on Thursday at 2pm 🤓

Call for participation at the Delibertion4Good workshop! We are gathering people from computer, psychology, political sciences and everyone interested in how people collaborate to solve problems.

delibot.xyz/deliberation4g…

#NLProc #DialogueSystems #Deliberation4Good

'The priority should be less about increasing vigilance towards false news and more about fostering interest and restoring trust in reliable information'

I wrote a new article for Works in Progress on why being a 'good' environmentalist often feels like you're doing the wrong thing.

worksinprogress.substack.com/p/notes-on-pro…

I wrote a short piece on why the recent panic surrounding misinformation is misguided and how the concept of rationalisation markets is superior for understanding many forms of epistemic dysfunction in political and cultural media (1/17). blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocial…

New paper with Syalie Liu and Sacha Altay, now in Climatic Change (psyarxiv.com/jmhwq/). For a long time, most people and news outlets have talked about climate change in a moderate, non-accusatorial manner...

Suspect our finding - that news sources rated trustworthy generated 40+ times as much web traffic across 🇺🇸🇬🇧🇫🇷🇩🇪 from 2017-2021 as those rated untrustworthy - will get about as much elite attention as Jennifer Allen et al finding that 'fake news' is ~0.15% of Americans' media diet.

when we founded Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media *this* is precisely the kind of work for which we wanted to offer a home, so excited to see this out there, tx to Sacha Altay Rasmus Kleis Nielsen & colleagues for the work

Platform differences are consistent - crudely put, FB worse than web, often by 5x or more in terms of % going to untrustworthy sources.

Country differences also - crudely put, 🇺🇸 and 🇫🇷 3-4x worse than 🇩🇪.

Hope for future cross-platform and cross-country comparative work. 6/6

How did the coronavirus pandemic affect people’s online news consumption?

Sacha Altay has led work out now in Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media, examining web traffic data and Facebook engagement in 🇺🇸🇬🇧🇫🇷🇩🇪 2017-2021.

We find people mainly turned to reliable news outlets journalqd.org/article/view/3… 1/6

In this piece for the French journal Libération, I argue with Hugo Mercier that 'the main problem is not unbridled credulity towards false information, but rather excessive vigilance towards reliable information'

'While some […] no doubt engaged more with problematic information during the pandemic, we find no evidence of a structural shift in the direction of untrustworthy sources.'

Great new work by Sacha Altay, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen & Richard Fletcher!