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The aim of the study is to investigate the impact of social feedback on sharing behaviour, given that the news story that is shared is potentially spurious. There are two versions of the social context in which sharing occurs (face to face, social media). For each of the social sharing contexts, there are two main manipulations, the first is whether the initial response to the news story was well received by the social group, or not, and the second is, after having discovered that the new story story was discredited, if participants choose to share, then they face the second manipulation, which is either the social group receive the story well and provide social approval, or they don't. The main objective of the study is to examine the extent to which people continue to share discredited new stories, even on receipt of negative social feedback, or because they anticipate positive social feedback regardless. In this way, the experiments will inform the extent to which people persist with sharing discredited news by updating according to social feedback, or irrespective of it.

The present online study investigates the properties of question that lay people agree on that makes a research question easy to understand, as well as worth answering. As yet there is limited understanding about the features of a question that in combination lead to an overall judgment that a question is good or not good. Graesser, Person, and Huber (1992) have proposed a GPH scheme that outlines two general features of questions that enable an overall assessment that a question is presented in a manner that makes it of value: “content” the structure of the information sought, “question-generation mechanism” the psychological processes––goals, plans, and knowledge––which bring about a question. The GPH Scheme lists also lists four specific properties that consider the question-generation mechanisms: 1) reducing, or correcting, a knowledge deficit; 2) monitoring common ground; 3) social coordination of action; and 4) control of conversation and attention. Up until now, there is no analysis of research questions based on the GPH scheme, and so the overall objective is to present participants with an online survey that is comprised of four sets of judgment probes that invite participants to consider a research question from the view of the following four properties of a question: 1) reducing, or correcting, a knowledge deficit; 2) monitoring common ground; 3) social coordination of action; and 4) control of conversation and attention. After they are presented with judgment probes related to each of these four properties, they will be invited to make an overall judgment as to whether they think the research question is worth answering, and the extent to which the research question is deemed a “good” question.