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Numerous indicators suggest that democracy is under threat, including in Europe. In 2020, The Economist’s democracy index determined that one EU member state, Hungary, was no longer a democracy. Throughout Europe, populist movements –mainly, but not exclusively, on the political right– have pitted “the people” against a presumed “elite” that is variously constructed as including mainstream media, politicians, experts, scientists, and academics. The COVID-19 pandemic has put further pressure on societies by requiring restrictions on social behaviours to control the pandemic that are unprecedented in democracies and that may facilitate autocratization. Although symptoms and causes of these trends are intertwined and difficultto tease apart, there is little doubt that wilful disregard of evidence and expertise, accompanied by a flood of misinformation –on social media, in hyperpartisan news sites, and in political discourse– are at the heart of the challenge to democracies. Misinformation matters: Exposure has been shown to make a causal contribution to populist voting in Italy, to triggering ethnic hate crimes in Germany and Russia, and it has been shown to set political agendas. Misinformation is particularly problematic because it has longer-term consequences: false information lingers in memory even if people acknowledge, believe, and try to adhere to a correction. Lingering misinformation, in turn, can be politically consequential, for example when corrections of politicians’ falsehoods do not affect people’s feeling about the politician or their voting intention. Misinformation, however, does not exist in a vacuum: misinformation is disseminated(sometimes intentionally, in which case it is best referred to as disinformation) and it is consumed and shared by the public. To understand the effects of misinformation on democracy thus requires an understanding of the processes of dissemination and consumption. In this chapter, I focus on twoimportant drivers of misinformation spread and how they interact with human cognition: First, I examine the role of demagogues; that is, political leaders who rely on false claims and promises, and emotive exploitation of people’s prejudices, in order to gain power. How do they exercise power, and why do peopleaccept demagoguery? Second, I examine the role of social media, focusing in particular on the role of algorithms. How does social media capture human attention? Why do people participate in sharing of misinformation?

An increasing number of real-world interventions aim to preemptively protect or “inoculate” people against misinformation. Inoculation research has demonstrated positive effects on misinformation resilience when measured immediately after treatment via messages, games, or videos. However, very little is currently known about their long-term effectiveness and the mechanisms by which such treatment effects decay over time. We report five pre-registered longitudinal experiments (Ntotal = 11,759) that investigate the effectiveness of psychological inoculation interventions over time. We find that text-based and video-based inoculation interventions can remain effective for one month (whereas game-based interventions appear to decay more rapidly), and that memory-enhancing “booster interventions” can boost the diminishing effects of counter-misinformation interventions to the original effect size. We conclude that misinformation researchers would benefit from integrating knowledge from the cognitive science of memory to design a new generation of psychological interventions that can counter misinformation durably over time and at-scale.

This study is designed to test the efficacy of nine different interventions (and a control condition).

In recent years, the UK has become divided along two key dimensions: party affiliation and Brexit position. We explored how division along these two dimensions interacts with the correction of political misinformation. Participants saw accurate and inaccurate statements (either balanced or mostly inaccurate) from two politicians from opposing parties but the same Brexit position (Experiment 1), or the same party but opposing Brexit positions (Experiment 2). Replicating previous work, fact-checking statements led participants to update their beliefs, increasing belief after fact affirmations and decreasing belief for corrected misinformation, even for politically aligned material. After receiving fact-checks participants had reduced voting intentions and more negative feelings towards party-aligned politicians (likely due to low baseline support for opposing party politicians). For Brexit alignment, the opposite was found: participants reduced their voting intentions and feelings for opposing (but not aligned) politicians following the fact-checks. These changes occurred regardless of the proportion of inaccurate statements, potentially indicating participants expect politicians to be accurate more than half the time. Finally, although we found division based on both party and Brexit alignment, effects were much stronger for party alignment, highlighting that even though new divisions have emerged in UK politics, the old divides remain dominant.

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-scx-10.1177_10755470231162634 for Science Communication as a Collective Intelligence Endeavor: A Manifesto and Examples for Implementation by Dawn Holford, Angelo Fasce, Katy Tapper, Miso Demko, Stephan Lewandowsky, Ulrike Hahn, Christoph M. Abels, Ahmed Al-Rawi, Sameer Alladin, T. Sonia Boender, Hendrik Bruns, Helen Fischer, Christian Gilde, Paul H. P. Hanel, Stefan M. Herzog, Astrid Kause, Sune Lehmann, Matthew S. Nurse, Caroline Orr, Niccolò Pescetelli, Maria Petrescu, Sunita Sah, Philipp Schmid, Miroslav Sirota and Marlene Wulf in Science Communication

This pre-registration is part of a larger international study of HCPs that includes other variables and questions about vaccines. Methods for the data collection in each of the five countries involved (UK, Germany, France, Portugal, Finland) are pre-registered in separate documentation prior to data collection. This pre-registration deals specifically with planned analyses for one DV in the data (HCP's perception of the difficulty to rebut anti-vaccination arguments.)

Binational study (Portugal and the UK) to assess the relationship between family cohesion, vaccine-related behaviours, and the Pro-VC-Be.

This pre-registration specifies hypotheses and method for the study prior to data collection.

This is a pre-registration of the hypotheses and methods prior to data collection.

Preregistration of analyses related to HCPs’ attitudes to Covid-19 mandates (JITSUVAX WP1)

Experimental materials, data and analysis scripts underlying the paper "TITLE".

This is a pre-registration of the hypotheses and method prior to data collection.

This study builds on previous work that finds that the sharing of partisan political content and misinformation on social media is often driven by the perceived 'political usefulness' of the content, and affective polarization. The current study draws on inoculation theory to develop an 'inoculation' video that aims to demotivate the sharing of highly partisan political content online by informing viewers of the consequences of growing polarization, how they contribute to growing polarization with the sharing of this content, the techniques used to manipulate them (i.e. scapegoating, ad-hominem attacks and emotional language), and reminds them that shared humanity transcends political lines. The study will test the effectiveness of this inoculation in reducing the sharing of synthetic highly partisan derogatory political content centered around the highly polarized issue of Brexit.