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In this paper we investigate the effect of moral suasion on ingroup favouritism. We report a well-powered, pre-registered, two-stage 2x2 mixed-design experiment. In the first stage, groups are formed on the basis of how participants answer a set of questions, concerning non-morally relevant issues in one treatment (assorting on non-moral preferences), and morally relevant issues in another treatment (assorting on moral preferences). In the second stage, participants choose how to split a given amount of money between participants of their own group and participants of the other group, first in the baseline setting and then in a setting where they are told to do what they believe to be morally right (moral suasion). Our main results are: (i) in the baseline, participants tend to favour their own group to a greater extent when groups are assorted according to moral preferences, compared to when they are assorted according to non-moral preferences; (ii) the net effect of moral suasion is to decrease ingroup favouritism, but there is also a non-negligible proportion of participants for whom moral suasion increases ingroup favouritism; (iii) the effect of moral suasion is substantially stable across group assorting and four pre-registered individual characteristics (gender, political orientation, religiosity, pro-life vs pro-choice ethical convictions).

In this article, we test and compare several message-based nudges designed to promote civil discourse and reduce the circulation of harmful content such as hate speech. We conducted a large pre-registered experiment (N = 4,081) to measure the effectiveness of seven nudges: making descriptive norms, injunctive norms, or personal norms salient, cooling down negative emotions, stimulating deliberation or empathy, and highlighting reputation. We used an online platform that reproduces a social media newsfeed and presented the nudge as a message when entering the platform. Our findings indicate that none of the nudges significantly impacts participants’ engagement with harmful content. At the same time, nudges making descriptive norms salient selectively increase participants’ overall engagement with relatively harmless content. Additionally, making injunctive norms salient increased the likelihood of liking harmless posts. Exploratory text analysis also reveals that highlighting reputation leads to more substantial and coherent comments on harmful posts. These results suggest that nudges that activate norm considerations represent a promising approach to promoting civil discourse and making social media a safer and more inclusive space for all.

In this paper we investigate the effect of moral suasion on ingroup favouritism. We report a well-powered, pre-registered, two-stage 2x2 mixed-design experiment. In the first stage, groups are formed on the basis of how participants answer a set of questions, concerning non-morally relevant issues in one treatment (assorting on non-moral preferences), and morally relevant issues in another treatment (assorting on moral preferences). In the second stage, participants choose how to split a given amount of money between participants of their own group and participants of the other group, first in the baseline setting and then in a setting where they are told to do what they believe to be morally right (moral suasion). Our main results are: (i) in the baseline, participants tend to favour their own group to a greater extent when groups are assorted according to moral preferences, compared to when they are assorted according to non-moral preferences; (ii) the net effect of moral suasion is to decrease ingroup favouritism, but there is also a non-negligible proportion of participants for whom moral suasion increases ingroup favouritism; (iii) the effect of moral suasion is substantially stable across group assorting and four pre-registered individual characteristics (gender, political orientation, religiosity, pro-life vs pro-choice ethical convictions).

Professional fact-checking of individual news headlines is an effective way to fight misinformation, but it is not easily scalable, because it cannot keep pace with the massive speed at which news content gets posted on social media. Here we provide evidence for the effectiveness of ratings of news sources, instead of individual news articles. In a large pre-registered experiment with quota-sampled Americans, we find that participants are less likely to share false headlines (and more discerning of true versus false headlines) when 1-to-5 star trustworthiness ratings were applied to news headlines. This is true both when the ratings are generated by fact-checkers and by laypeople (although the effect is stronger using fact-checker ratings). We also observe a positive spillover effect: sharing discernment also increases for headlines whose source was not rated, likely because the presence of ratings on some headlines prompts users to reflect on source quality more generally. This study suggests that displaying information regarding the trustworthiness of news sources provides a scalable approach for reducing the spread of low-quality information.

La pandemia de COVID-19 ha afectado a todos los ámbitos de la vida humana, incluido el tejido económico y social de las sociedades. Una de las estrategias centrales para gestionar la salud pública a lo largo de la pandemia ha sido el envío de mensajes persuasivos y el cambio de comportamiento colectivo. Para ayudar a los estudiosos a comprender mejor la psicología social y moral que subyace al comportamiento en materia de salud pública, presentamos un conjunto de datos compuesto por 51.404 individuos de 69 países. Este conjunto de datos se recopiló para el proyecto de la Colaboración Internacional en Psicología Social y Moral de COVID-19 (ICSMP COVID-19). Esta encuesta de ciencias sociales invitó a participantes de todo el mundo a completar una serie de medidas morales y psicológicas y actitudes de salud pública sobre COVID-19 durante una fase temprana de la pandemia de COVID-19 (entre abril y junio de 2020). La encuesta incluía siete grandes categorías de preguntas: Creencias sobre COVID-19 y conductas de cumplimiento; identidad y actitudes sociales; ideología; salud y bienestar; creencias morales y motivación; rasgos de personalidad; y variables demográficas. Presentamos los datos brutos y depurados, junto con todos los materiales de la encuesta, las visualizaciones de los datos y las evaluaciones psicométricas de las variables clave.

The new coronavirus disease (COVID-19) threatens the lives of millions of people around the world, making it the largest health threat in recent times. Billions of people around the world are asked to adhere to strict shelter-in-place rules, finalised to slow down the spread of the virus. Appeals and messages are being used by leaders and policy-makers to promote pandemic response. Given the stakes at play, it is thus important for social scientists to explore which messages are most effective in promoting pandemic response. In fact, some papers in the last month have explored the effect of several messages on people's intentions to engage in pandemic response behaviour. In this paper, we make two contributions. First, we explore the effect of messages on people's actual engagement, and not on intentions. Specifically, our dependent variables are the level of understanding of official COVID-19 pandemic response governmental informative panels, measured through comprehension questions, and the time spent on reading these rules. Second, we test a novel set of appeals built through the theory of norms. One message targets the personal norm (what people think is the right thing to do), one targets the descriptive norm (what people think others are doing), and one targets the injunctive norm (what people think others approve or disapprove of). Our experiment is conducted online with a representative (with respect to gender, age, and location) sample of Italians. Norms are made salient using a flier. We find that norm-based fliers had no effect on comprehension and on time spent on the panels. These results suggest that norm-based interventions through fliers have very little impact on people's reading and understanding of COVID-19 pandemic response governmental rules.

In this paper we investigate the effect of moral suasion on ingroup favouritism. We report a well-powered, pre-registered, two-stage 2x2 mixed-design experiment. In the first stage, groups are formed on the basis of how participants answer to a set of questions, concerning non-morally relevant issues in one treatment (assorting on non-moral preferences), and morally relevant issues in another treatment (assorting on moral preferences). In the second stage, participants choose how to split a given amount of money between participants of their own group and participants of the other group, first in the baseline setting and then in a setting where they are told to do what they believe to be morally right (moral suasion). Our main results are: (i) in the baseline, participants tend to favour their own group to a greater extent when groups are assorted according to moral preferences, compared to when they are assorted according to non-moral preferences; (ii) the net effect of moral suasion is to decrease ingroup favouritism, but there is also a non-negligible proportion of participants for whom moral suasion increases ingroup favouritism; (iii) the effect of moral suasion is substantially stable across group assorting and four pre-registered individual characteristics (gender, political orientation, religiosity, pro-life vs pro-choice ethical convictions).