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Piecing together why so many people are willing to share misinformation online is a major focus among behavioral scientists. It's easy to think partisanship is driving it all—people will simply share things that make their side look good or their opponents look bad. But the reality is a bit more complicated. Studies have indicated that many people don't seem to carefully evaluate links for accuracy, and that partisanship may be secondary to the rush of getting a lot of likes on social media . Given that, it's not clear what induces users to stop sharing things that a small bit of checking would show to be untrue.

So, a team of researchers tried the obvious: We'll give you money if you stop and evaluate a story's accuracy. The work shows that small payments and even minimal rewards boost the accuracy of people's evaluation of stories. Nearly all that effect comes from people recognizing stories that don't favor their political stance as factually accurate. While the cash boosted the accuracy of conservatives more, they were so far behind liberals in judging accuracy that the gap remains substantial.

Money for accuracy

The basic outline of the new experiments is pretty simple: get a bunch of people, ask them about their political leanings, and then show them a bunch of headlines as they would appear on a social media site such as Facebook. The headlines were rated based on their accuracy (i.e., whether they were true or misinformation) and whether they would be more favorable to liberals or conservatives.

Enlarge / The risk of violence has become a backdrop for protests and polls in the US. (credit: Nathan Howard / Getty Images )

It's no secret that the US is suffering from a reduced commitment to one of its foundational principles: democratic representation. Gerrymandering, political violence, and unfounded accusations of election fraud are in the news regularly, and the widespread support for them raises questions about why so much of the population has suddenly turned against democratic ideas.

One of the simplest potential explanations is that it's a product of partisanship grown ugly. Rather than thinking of political opponents as simply wrong, a growing fraction of the US public views their political opposites as a threat that needs to be neutralized. If your opponents represent a danger to society, how could you possibly accept them winning elections?

If that's a major driver, then lowering the partisan temperature should help. And, conveniently, social scientists have developed interventions that do exactly that. But now, a team of researchers has tested that and found that it doesn't work. You can make people more comfortable with their partisan opposites, and they'll still want to suppress their vote—possibly with violence.