EAGER: SaTC: Investigation of misinformation beliefs expressed and spread online

Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the widespread propagation of misinformation and the presence of active campaigns of malevolent persuasion via social cyberattacks. These trends threaten the integrity of public discourse, and pose significant challenges to productive information sharing. This program of research tests whether and how moral beliefs play a role in this process.

Specifically, the goal of the project is to understand how some misinformation campaigns assert influence by tapping into their target audiences core values, and how this process can be monitored and prevented. We test morality as a potentially special case of ideological belief that may have a unique role in online persuasion. Overall, by examining social and cognitive processes influenced by modern social cyberattacks that target core values of their audience, this project has the potential to greatly increase our ability to predict and build resilience against future attacks.

The project’s hypothesis arises from research showing that once an issue is framed as moral, it may become a non-negotiable imperative that merits acting upon regardless of the consequences. Our project is organized into two aims in service of this overall goal: 1) To investigate the social and cognitive mechanisms of moral and utilitarian message framing.

In this aim, we test the persuasiveness of different types of message framing, both utilitarian and deontological, to test whether messages that are framed to resonate with the moral values of their target audiences exert special influence; 2) To examine how apparent social network information shapes responses to shared moral and utilitarian content. Given that adversaries often exert influence by manipulating social structures, we examine how information such as senders’ apparent social network characteristics shapes responses to messages and whether perception of moral as opposed to utilitarian beliefs of a social group is particularly impactful.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.