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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.

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An unfortunate feature of science is that two experiments that are ostensibly looking at the same thing can produce different results. Often, the different results are greeted unhelpfully as the experimenters—and sometimes even the entire field—are accused of being garbage. A more helpful response is to consider whether the experiments, while looking at the same thing, might not be identical. And, if they're not, whether the differences between them might tell us something.

A new study in Nature Human Behavior describes a subtle way some psychology experiments could differ: if they include breaks to let their participants avoid tiring out. Enforced breaks can cause people's moods to drop and continue dropping if the break drags on. And, since mood affects behavior in a variety of other psychological tests, this has the potential to have a complicating influence on a huge range of studies.

Waiting is the hardest part

The work began with an incredibly simple finding. Most studies operate under the assumption that a participant's mood remains relatively stable throughout an experiment. But the researchers here asked participants to rate their mood at the start and end of experiments—and thus at the start and end of breaks between the experiments. The researchers noticed that the mood went down pretty consistently over the course of the break. After a roughly 10-minute break, people assessed their mood as more than 20 percent lower than when the break started.

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Off the Edge is not a book about conspiracy theories, exactly. It does get there, but really it is a book about the history of the Flat Earth movement as the sort of original conspiracy theory. It is the second such book, in fact; Christine Garwood wrote Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea in 2007. But it is a whole different world now, conspiracy-theory-wise, so Kelly Weill thought an update was in order.

Weill covers extremism, disinformation, and the Internet for The Daily Beast , a website whose tagline is “a smart, speedy take on news from around the world.” (A previous editor-in-chief described it as a “high-end tabloid.”) Like the site, the book is well-researched and makes for quick and entertaining, if disturbing, reading.

The pull of conspiracy

Weill started Off the Edge when she noticed Flat Earthers repeatedly cropping up in the far and alt-right chat groups and websites she was covering. She said that she initially thought they were a joke because “how could anyone really believe anything so ludicrous?” To find out, she entered their world; the book is in first-person, with Weill frequently recounting her misadventures meeting Flat Earthers and attending their conferences.

Enlarge / Vintage illustration of medieval women wearing kirtles. A kirtle (sometimes called a cotte or cotehardie) is a garment that was worn by men and women in the Middle Ages. It eventually became a one-piece garment worn by women from the late Middle Ages into the Baroque period. (credit: duncan1890 )

In the illuminating and entertaining blog Going Medieval , Eleanor Janega, a medievalist at the London School of Economics, upends prevalent misconceptions about medieval Europe. These misunderstandings include that people didn’t bathe ( they did ) and that these were the Dark Ages *. Her new book, The Once and Future Sex , is subtitled “Going Medieval on Women’s Roles in Society,” and that's exactly what she does—if by “going medieval” you intend the pop culture meaning of "dismembering in a barbaric manner" which, despite her protestations , you probably do.

Her main thrust, in the blog and in the book, is that it's easy and convenient for us to envision medieval times as being backward in every way because that makes modern times seem all that much more spectacular. But not only is this wrong, it's dangerous. Just because life is definitely better for women now than it was then, that doesn’t mean our current place in society is optimal or somehow destined. It's not.

Progress did not proceed in a straight arrow from bad times then to good times now. Maintaining that things were horrible then deludes us into thinking that they must be at their pinnacle now. Janega lays out this argument in the introduction and then spends the bulk of the text citing evidence to bolster it.

Enlarge / Those lab coats aren't going to protect you from your own biases. (credit: Caiaimage/Robert Daly )

It's no secret that ideology is one of the factors that influences which evidence people will accept. But it was a bit of a surprise that ideology could dominate decision-making in the face of a pandemic that has killed over a million people in the US. Yet a large number of studies have shown that stances on COVID vaccination and death rates, among other things, show a clear partisan divide.

And it's not just the general public having issues. We'd like to think people like doctors would carefully evaluate evidence before making treatment decisions, yet a correlation between voting patterns and ivermectin prescriptions suggests that they don't.

Of course, a correlation at that sort of population level leaves a lot of unanswered questions about what's going on. A study this week tries to fill in some of those blanks by performing controlled experiments with a set of MDs. The work clearly shows how ideology clouds professional judgements even when it comes to reading the results of a scientific study.

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.

Enlarge / This looks worrisome, but I've got a pandemic to panic about. (credit: Gerhard Pettersson / EyeEm )

It's safe to say that the first two years of the pandemic left a lot of people exhausted and emotionally drained. A new study suggests that the exhaustion showed a reduced ability to care about other global problems.

The work relied on surveying all English-language Twitter for tweets related to climate change both before and during the pandemic. The researchers involved found that the number of climate-related tweets dropped roughly in proportion to rising COVID-19 cases, and that the remaining tweets tended to be more optimistic than those in pre-pandemic times. Overall, this suggests that the pandemic taxed what some behavioral scientists call our "finite pool of worry."

In the deep end

The idea of a finite pool of worry is probably pretty intuitive to most of us. Worrying about something takes a toll on us emotionally, and that toll comes from a finite pool of emotional reserves. Once those reserves are depleted, we actually couldn't care less—we lose the ability to worry about things that we would otherwise find concerning. That's not to say that we'd say they're not worrying if we were asked—we just aren't likely to spontaneously expend attention on them.

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If you went to high school in the US, you may recall early morning extracurriculars, sleeping through first period algebra, or bleary-eyed late-night study sessions (as opposed to other wide-awake “study sessions” we told our parents we were having). As an adult, you might wonder if there’s a better time to explore Shakespeare than at 8 am, or expand a Taylor series right after you collapsed into your chair, half-asleep from your sunrise bus ride.

As it turns out, early school start times for US high schools are built on a shaky scientific foundation, as journalist and parent Lisa Lewis lays out in her new book, The Sleep-Deprived Teen . She details why high schools in the US tend to start early, the science behind why that’s bad for kids, and how later school start times can benefit not only teenagers, but, well… everyone. Perhaps most importantly, she provides a primer on advocating for change in your community.

The wheels on the bus go round and round

Our early start times are a bit of a historical accident. In the first half of the 20th century, schools tended to be small and local—most students could walk. Lewis points out that in 1950, there were still 60,000 one-room schoolhouses around the country. By 1960, that number had dwindled to around 20,000.

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People have long tried to use music as a tool to improve their abilities. Soldiers chanted songs when marching into battle, sailors sang songs on long voyages, and cloth makers sang when weaving. But do we have any evidence that music makes a difference for any of our activities?

We’ve only recently started to ask that question scientifically. It began with the Mozart effect, which seemed to link classical music to improved mental performance. Named after the famous composer, it was shorthand for the apparent boost in IQ tests that people listening to his music experienced. But the phenomenon turned out not to be real. “Background music was thought to help with work. [It was] found to be the noise stopping the person from being distracted,” says Professor Concetta Tomaino, executive director and co-founder of the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function.

However, research into music and its effects on human abilities continued and eventually resulted in the discovery of an effect called brain entrainment, which appears capable of improving memory, focus, sleep, and physical activity.