Whether people consume news in a social setting or alone can affect how likely they are to fact-check. Research suggests people let their guard down when they’re in groups and become less skeptical. Morning Edition, NPR News Read more »
Twitter’s Passion Politics
… To better understand how political discourse works on Twitter, we recently analyzed more than half a million public tweets on three political topics — same-sex marriage, gun control and climate change — in the year leading up to the 2016 election. Our research, which was published this month in […] Read more »
Confidence Boomed After the Election. The Economy Hasn’t.
After Donald J. Trump won the presidential election, Americans’ optimism about the economic future soared. But midway through the year, that optimism has not translated into concrete economic gains. This seeming contradiction exposes a reality about the role of psychology in economics — or more specifically, how psychology is connected […] Read more »
A Superhero Power for Our Time: How to Handle the Truth
… A decade ago, the comedian Stephen Colbert introduced viewers to the idea of “truthiness,” a quality belonging to claims that were based on gut feelings instead of facts. Last year, the Oxford Dictionaries named the word “post-truth” the word of the year. It’s a description of a general characteristic […] Read more »
What makes populist leaders tick? Here are 3 things we’ve learned.
… For decades, most political theories tended to assume that people were rational, which suggested that it didn’t much matter exactly who held power. Of course, psychologists have known for a long time that this assumption wasn’t always true, but it was difficult to study top decision-makers to draw general […] Read more »
Elections Have Consequences . . . for Norms Too
… In the two weeks before the election, three economists surveyed Mechanical Turkers in eight very Red states. The MTurkers were asked, in addition to other on-topic questions, if they would authorize the economists to make a donation on their behalf to a strongly anti-immigrant group, FAIR. … The results […] Read more »