SSRN Id3138238
SSRN Id3138238
SSRN Id3138238
1) Decision Sciences Collaborative, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA
2 ) Department of Social Sciences, University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany
Keywords: deception; post-truth politics; pro-social behavior; fake news; alternative facts
Introduction
Few would dispute that many people have lied to achieve their political agendas in the past,
but this problem has become particularly bad lately. Recent political events, such as the
successful tactics used by Donald Trump’s campaign during the 2016 US presidential campaign
and the “Vote Leave” campaign in the UK Brexit referendum, have caused the venerable Oxford
Dictionary to choose as the 2016 word of the year post-truth, “circumstances in which objective
facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”
(Oxford Dictionaries, 2016).
On the one hand, post-truth political methods have to do with the quantity of lies. For
example, The Washington Post’s well-respect Fact-Checking Column has compared the two
major candidates in the US presidential election in early November 2016, and found that one
of them – Trump – received their worst rating for claims fact-checking 63 percent of the time,
while the other candidate – Hillary Clinton – received the worst rating 14.2 percent of the time.
Notably, previously, most candidates received the worst rating between 10 and 20 percent of the
time (Cillizza, 2016).
On the other, post-truth politics involves a new model of behavior when caught lying. Unlike
previous politicians who backed away when caught lying, post-truth politicians do not back away
from their falsehoods. Instead, they attack those who point out their deceptions, undermining
public trust in credible experts and reliable news sources. This may help explain why trust
among Republicans in the media has fallen by more than half, from 32 to 14 percent, from
September 2015 to September 2016 (Swift, 2016).
This is not only a problem with public figures: fake news, more recently termed “viral deception”
by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, is sweeping social
media, shared by ordinary citizens (The Annenberg Public Policy Center, 2017). Sharing such
misinformation – at least by private citizens – is not necessarily intended to harm others or
even deliberately deceive. Our emotions and intuitions focus more on protecting our worldview
and personal identity, and less on finding out the most accurate information (Haidt, 2012;
McDermott, 2004; Nyhan & Reifler, 2010). Still, regardless of the intentions, the impact of
sharing this misinformation is vast. A study showed that in the three months before the US
presidential election, the top 20 fake election-related news stories on Facebook received more
engagements – reactions, comments, and shares – than the top 20 real news stories, 8,711,000
compared to 7,367,000 (Silverman, 2016). Thus, real news in this case has been outcompeted by
fake news. Another study, which looked at a wider number of fake news stories, showed that
in the same period of three months before the 2016 US Presidential election, 156 misleading
news stories got just under 38 million shares on Facebook (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017). Note
that the researchers in this study examined shares on Facebook rather than engagements: the
latter number would have been much higher. Fake news tends to favor conservative perspectives:
the same study showed that stories favorable to Donald Trump were shared 30 million times,
while those favorable to Hillary Clinton were shared a total of 7.6 million times. The specific
impact of candidates on their supporters sharing false information may be explained in part by
the research on emotional contagion, which shows that followers tend to absorb and emulate the
emotions of their leaders (Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1993).
How impactful is such sharing? First, we need to recognize that most US adults get news on
social media, 62 percent according to a recent poll by the Pew Research Center (Gottfried &
Shearer, 2016). Another recent poll by Ipsos, conducted in late November and early December
2016, showed that American adults are prone to be deceived by fake news headlines. Surveying
3,015 adults, the method of this poll involved showing respondents six election-related headlines,
three false and three true, and asked if they recognized the headline. In the case that they
did recognize the headline, the respondents were asked to rate the headline as “very accurate,”
“somewhat accurate,” “not very accurate,” or “not at all accurate.” Of the people who recognized
the fake election-related headlines, approximately 75 percent rated the headlines “very accurate”
or “somewhat accurate.” Republicans were slightly more likely to be fooled by fake news, rating
fake news headlines they recalled as accurate 84 percent of the time, compared to 71 percent for
Democrats (Silverman & Singer-Vine, 2016).
This fake news came from a variety of channels, but a major portion came from Russia’s efforts to
use its digital propaganda efforts to influence the US election. US intelligence agencies uniformly
agree about Russia’s role. Recent US congressional investigations also shed light on Russia’s
successful efforts (Kwong, 2017). Of course, political partisans for either side, but especially
Republicans, created massive amounts of fake news (Green & Issenberg, 2016). So did people
trying to make money off spreading fake news (Subramanian, 2017).
Of course, the US is far from unique in the impact of fake news. The UK was another target of
Russian’s digital propaganda efforts, with researchers at the University of Edinburgh finding
many hundreds of accounts operating by the Russian Internet Research Agency trying to spread
fake news to influence UK politics (Booth, Weaver, Hern, & Walker, 2017). Russia-owned
accounts spread misinformation in Spain to stir up the Catalonian independence movement
(Palmer, 2017). Russia likewise used misinformation to try to influence the German 2017 elections
(Shuster, 2017). The 2017 French elections also drew a great deal of fake news, with a substantial
amount coming from Russian-backed accounts (Farand, 2017). Those outside the US are similarly
highly susceptible to believing fake news when exposed to it. For example, a research study on
misinformation in the 2017 French election found that exposing voting-age French people to
deceptive election-related statements resulted in the study subjects believing Le Pen’s falsehoods.
Fact-checking improved the likelihood that people believed in the actual facts (Barrera, Guriev,
Henry, & Zhuravskaya, 2017).
Since it is actively harmful for our global society for people to believe in and spread falsehoods,
how can we stop this problem? A recent research article by prominent scholars in the field
suggested any effort to address the situation “must involve technological solutions incorporating
psychological principles, an interdisciplinary approach that we describe as ‘technocognition.’”
(Swire, Berinsky, Lewandowsky, & Ecker, 2017). In the meantime, a separate group of psycholo-
gists have been thinking along the same lines, and have come up with a proposed technocognitive
intervention we term the Pro-Truth Pledge (PTP). The pledge asks signees to commit to 12
behaviors that research in psychology shows correlate with an orientation toward truthfulness.
Early results show both that private citizens and public figures are willing to take the pledge,
and interviews, external observations, and quantitative studies show evidence of the effectiveness
of the pledge.
Although our society as a whole loses when deception is rampant in the public sphere, individuals
who practice deceptive behaviors often gain for their own agendas. This type of situation is
known as a “tragedy of the commons,” following a famous article in Science by Harding (1968).
Harding demonstrated that in areas where a group of people share a common resource without
any controls on the use of this resource, each individual may well have a strong interest in
taking more of the common resource than is their fair share, leading to individual gain at great
cost to the community as a whole. A well-known tragedy of the commons is environmental
pollution (Vogler, 2000). We all gain from clean air and water, yet individual polluters, from a
game-theoretical perspective, may well gain more – at least in the short and medium term – from
polluting our environment (Hanley & Folmer, 1998). Pollution of truth is arguably similarly
devastating to the atmosphere of trust in our political environment.
Solving tragedies of the commons requires, according to Hardin, “mutual coercion, mutually
agreed upon by the majority of the people affected,” so as to prevent these harmful outcomes
where a few gain at the cost of everyone else (Harding, 1968). The environmental movement
presents many examples of successful efforts to addressing the tragedy of the commons in
environmental pollution (Ostrom, 2015). Only substantial disincentives for polluting outweigh
the benefits of polluting from a game theoretical perspective (Fang-yuan 2007). Particularly
illuminating is a theoretical piece by Mark van Vugt describing the application of psychology
research to the tragedy of the commons in the environment. His analysis showed that in addition
to mutual coercion by an external party such as the government, the commons can be maintained
through a combination of providing credible information, appealing to people’s identities, setting
up new or changing existing institutions, and shifting the incentives for participants (Van Vugt,
2009).
The research on successful strategies used by the environmental movement fits well with work on
choice architecture and libertarian paternalism. “Libertarian paternalism” refers to an approach
to private and public institutions that aims to use findings from psychology about problematic
human thinking patterns – cognitive biases – to shape human behavior for social good while
also respecting individual freedom of choice (Sunstein & Thaler, 2003a, 2003b, 2008). Choice
architecture is the method of choice used by libertarian paternalists, through shaping human
choices for the welfare of society as a whole, by setting up default options, anticipating errors,
giving clear feedback, creating appropriate incentives, and so on (E. Johnson et al., 2012; Jolls,
Sunstein, & Thaler, 1998; Selinger & Whyte, 2011; Sunstein, Thaler, & Balz, 2010).
The Pro-Truth Pledge (PTP), created by a team of behavioral scientists coming primarily
from a psychology background, is informed by strategies that have proven successful in the
environmental movement and combines them with choice architecture. The pledge is not a way
for pledge organizers to tell people what is the truth, but to get them to adopt research-informed
methods meant to orient toward accurate evaluation of reality. In taking the pledge, signees
agree to abide by twelve behaviors, which are intended to counteract a number of cognitive
biases that contribute to people believing in and sharing misinformation, an essential aspect
of the psychology research informing the content of the pledge itself. The full pledge reads as
follows:
• Acknowledge: acknowledge when others share true information, even when we disagree
otherwise
• Reevaluate: reevaluate if my information is challenged, retract it if I cannot verify it
• Defend: defend others when they come under attack for sharing true information, even
when we disagree otherwise
• Align: align my opinions and my actions with true information
• Fix: ask people to retract information that reliable sources have disproved even if they are
my allies
• Educate: compassionately inform those around me to stop using unreliable sources even if
these sources support my opinion
• Defer: recognize the opinions of experts as more likely to be accurate when the facts are
disputed
• Celebrate: celebrate those who retract incorrect statements and update their beliefs toward
the truth
One of the biases that the pledge aims to address is the confirmation bias, our tendency to search
for and accept information that aligns with our current beliefs (Nickerson 1998). Research shows
that one way to address the confirmation bias involves asking people to consider and search for
evidence that disproves their initial beliefs, so that they would not violate the pledge by sharing
misinformation (Hirt and Markman 1995, Kray and Galinsky 2003, Lilienfeld, Ammirati and
Landfield 2009).
To ensure full clarity on what constitutes violations of the pledge, the pledge spells out what
misinformation means from the perspective of the PTP: anything that goes against the truth of
reality, such as directly lying, lying by omission, or misrepresenting the truth to suit one’s own
purposes. While sometimes misinformation is blatant, sometimes it is harder to tell, and for
these tough calls, the PTP relies on credible fact-checking organizations – the same ones that
Facebook uses for its fact-checking program – and/or the scientific consensus, as recognized by
meta-analysis studies and statements from influential scientific organizations.1 The pledge asks
1
The full text of the statement on what the pledge consider misinformation is given in the FAQ of the pledge,
to avoid misconceptions and provide clarity. It can be seen in the link below: Pro-Truth Pledge (n.d.). Pro-Truth
people to take time to verify information before sharing it, by going to reliable fact-checking
websites or evaluating the scientific consensus on any given topic. By taking time to verify
this information, signees get an opportunity to evaluate the accuracy of their information and
change their perspective if they do not find credible evidence supporting that information. This
aspect of the pledge aims to address the extensive sharing of fake news, both by private citizens
and by public figures (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017). It also aims to address the repeated sharing
of incorrect information, which produces the illusory truth effect, people’s belief that a false
statement is true due to multiple exposure to and thus growing comfort with the false statement
(Fazio, Brashier, Payne, & Marsh, 2015). Likewise, asking people to pause and verify before
sharing information will slow down their responses, which has been correlated with making fewer
errors and facilitating analytical thinking to counteract belief bias (Pennycook, Cheyne, Koehler,
& Fugelsang, 2013).
In the spirit of anticipating errors, an important aspect of choice architecture, the pledge
encourages signees to celebrate both others and themselves for retracting incorrect statements
and updating their beliefs toward the truth. We anticipate that another problematic factor
might be the in-group bias, which causes people to favor those who they perceive to be part of
their own group, and vice versa for those who they perceive as part of their out-group (Mullen,
Brown, & Smith, 1992; Verkuyten & Nekuee, 1999). To address the in-group bias, the pledge
asks people to defend other people who come under attack for sharing accurate information even
if they have different values, and to request that those who share inaccurate information retract
it, even if they are their friends and allies. The Dunning-Kruger effect is another cognitive bias
where those who have less expertise and skills in any given area have an inflated perception of
their abilities, in other words are ignorant of their own ignorance (Dunning, 2011; Ehrlinger,
Johnson, Banner, Dunning, & Kruger, 2008; Kruger & Dunning, 1999; Sheldon, Dunning, &
Ames, 2014). To address this problem, the pledge calls on signees to “recognize the opinions of
those who have substantially more expertise on a topic than myself as more likely to be accurate
in their assessments.”
In addition to the cognitive biases that facilitate deception, other studies have emerged on
motivators for honesty and dishonesty. If people perceived others around them as behaving
dishonestly, they were also more likely to behave dishonestly themselves; in turn, if they behaved
dishonestly, they perceived others as more likely to behave dishonestly (Gino, Norton, & Ariely,
2010). These two patterns together, once they start, create a self-reinforcing spiral of deception.
For our purposes, the parallel is clear. For instance, consider social media sharing of viral
Pledge FAQs. Accessed August 28, 2017 https://www.protruthpledge.org/misinformation/
deception. A person who spreads such deceptive content will perceive others around them as
more likely to spread viral deception than is actually the case; likewise, if that person sees
someone sharing misinformation, they will be more likely to share viral deception themselves, as
that person’s actions provide him with an implicit permission to do so. Similarly applicable to
spreading misinformation online, research shows that people are more likely to lie if they believe
it benefits their in-group (Mazar, Amir, & Ariely, 2006). So if someone sees an article favorable
to their political in-group, they would be more likely to share it without doing any fact-checking,
even if the article inspires some skepticism, by comparison to a neutral article. Doing such
promotion of questionable content favorable to one’s in-group both helps people feel like activists
for their cause, and signals to others in their social media network an alliance around shared
values, gaining them social capital. Moreover, research shows that if an expert corrects erroneous
information, people tend to not accept and internalize the correction unless they also trust the
expert; in turn, trust alone is enough to sway people to accept corrective information (Guillory
& Geraci, 2013). Thus, any proposed solution needs to address the perception of dishonesty
by others and oneself, address benefits to one’s in-group from dishonesty, and perceptions of
trustworthiness.
Fortunately, we also have research on what causes people to avoid dishonest behavior. Two
articles show some intriguing findings: reminders about ethical behavior made people less likely
to lie; getting people to sign an honor code or other commitment contract to honesty before
engaging in tasks involving temptation to lie increased honesty; making standards for truthful
behavior clear decreased deception (mazar2008a; Mazar, Amir, & Ariely, 2008). Evidence shows
that personal experience with an issue such as global climate change helps correct misinformation
about it (Myers, Maibach, Roser-Renouf, Akerlof, & Leiserowitz, 2013). Reminders about the
reputation costs of making false statements proved effective for reducing misinformation shared
by candidates for office (Nyhan & Reifler, 2010). This finding is particularly salient to the
potential impact of the pledge on public figures who have a reputation that might be negatively
impacted if they are found to share misinformation, due to the accountability mechanism of
pledge-takers monitoring each other, especially public figures who have taken the pledge.
In an interesting parallel to the environmental movement, those who chose to commit to recycling
by signing a pledge were more likely to follow their commitments in comparison to those who
just agreed to recycle (Katzev & Pardini, 1987). Our likelihood of lying is strongly impacted by
our social network, making it especially important to address social norms around deception
(Mann, Garcia-Rada, Houser, & D, 2014). Dan Ariely summarizes and synthesizes the research
on what moves us to lie and vice versa in his The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie
We separate the targets for the pledge signees into two categories, private citizens and public
figures, and will talk about the former first. Why would private citizens take the pledge?
Many people are frustrated and disheartened by the prevalence of deception in our society, and
especially in our political system. Signing the pledge gives them an opportunity to express their
discontent and help move our society toward greater honesty. This type of pro-social desire has
been found to be a strong motivator in environmental efforts (Van Lange, De Bruin, Otten,
& Joireman, 1997; Van Vugt & Samuelson, 1999). Furthermore, signing the pledge gives any
individual who signs it greater credibility among their peers who know they signed it. The
pledge encourages individuals who signed it to share about it on their social media and personal
networks, and also put a badge on their online presence indicating they signed it (Pro-Truth
Pledge Badge). They get access to unique resources available to signees, such as a search engine
composed of credible sources verified as reliable by the PTP organizers (Pro-Truth Pledge Search
Engine). They also get to join a variety of closed communities both online and in their local
area available only to pledge signees, where they can rely on the credibility of the information
being shared by those who signed the pledge and also support and encourage each other in
practicing behaviors advocated by the pledge. We know that peer support has proven helpful in
maintaining desired behavior change in contexts such as health behaviors, and we anticipate
that such support will help maintain truth-oriented behavior (Westman, Eden, & Shirom, 1985;
Zimmerman & Connor, 1989). The pledge appeals to people’s identities by asking for those who
self-identify as truthful and honest to take the pledge and join the community of pledge-takers.
This appeal to identity is informed by psychology research on the environmental movement
showed that people who report self-identification with a community tend to engage in behaviors
condoned by that community (Van Vugt, 2001).
However, would pledge-takers who are private citizens, and thus have no external monitoring,
follow such behaviors upon taking the pledge? Psychology research on precommitment suggests
that those who commit to a certain behavioral norm will be more likely to follow it (Ariely &
Wertenbroch, 2002). Another factor at play is post-factum justification or choice-supportive bias,
where our minds want to perceive our past decisions in a positive light, making us more likely to
stick to past commitments (Correia & Festinger, 2014). A related phenomena is a preference for
consistency, which recent research suggests influences many people to make decisions that are
consistent with their past decisions (Guadagno & Cialdini, 2010). Most relevantly for the PTP,
at schools that have honor codes students tend to engage in less academic dishonesty (McCabe
& Trevino, 1993; McCabe, Trevino, & Butterfield, 1999). Likewise, signing an honor code before
a test tends to decrease cheating compared to signing an honor code at the end of a test (L.
Shu, Mazar, Gino, Ariely, & Bazerman, 2012). This evidence is further supported by research
from the environmental movement on recycling, which shows that those who chose to commit
to recycling by signing a pledge were likely to follow on their commitments in comparison to
those who just agreed to recycle (Katzev and Pardini 1987). By analogy, we hypothesize that
taking the PTP will decrease sharing misinformation by shifting the underlying mental habits of
thought and feeling that contribute to deceptive behaviors, especially since we are concerned
with people not sharing misinformation after they sign the pledge rather than before it (Ariely
& Jones, 2012; Frijda, Manstead, & Bem, 2010).
We hypothesize that each of the four distinct activities listed above would make it more likely
for people to abide by the tenets of the PTP, based on research from successful environmental
movement strategies. We suspect that for those who sign the PTP without signing up for email
notifications or other forms of active engagement will have a small or perhaps negligible long-term
impact on their behaviors, due to the PTP fading from their mind. After all, research on health
behaviors shows that intentions to change behavior often fail before temptations or lack of energy,
which in the PTP context we can compare to failing to fact-check an article before sharing it
(Schwarzer, 2008). Still, given that people who have committed to recycling by signing a pledge
did practice recycling at a higher rate than those who did not, we may indeed witness some
impact. Other research on recycling shows that having information about conservation made
people more likely to engage in recycling (Oskamp et al., 1991). Getting email updates about
the PTP would serve that function. Studies on recycling also show that getting specific recycling
opportunities increased the likelihood of recycling, and the action alerts fill that function for
the PTP (Vining & Ebreo, 1992). Knowing that one is being monitored for recycling and may
get negative messages if one does not recycle has been shown to increase recycling behavior
(Lord, 1994). The parallel for the PTP is choosing to list oneself in a public PTP database and
thus make oneself available for monitoring, as well as sharing with one’s social network and on
social media that one took the PTP. Also supportive of the importance of the latter, studies of
consumers buying environmentally-friendly products showed that such purchases stemmed in part
from the opportunity to signal environmental friendliness to others as a form of status-seeking,
and thus sharing about the PTP would similarly signal truth-friendliness (Griskevicius, Tybur,
& Bergh, 2010). Active volunteering and community engagement in recycling programs, such
as block-leader programs, proved even more effective in increasing recycling behavior (Burn,
1991; Hopper & Nielsen, 1991). By analogy, we anticipate that those who engage actively in
PTP volunteering and community-oriented activities, online and in-person, will be even more
likely to exhibit truth-oriented behaviors. After all, community belonging is crucial for shaping
perceptions of self-identity and social norms, which research has found are so important in
determining truth-telling behavior.
Why should public figures take the PTP? We anticipate that some public figures would be
motivated by the same intrinsic motivations that would lead private citizens to take the pledge.
However, we wanted to provide particular incentives for public figures to take the pledge, and
also disincentives for breaking the pledge, and we decided to do so in the form of reputation.
Reputational rewards and penalties have been shown to be vital in addressing tragedies of the
commons in the environmental movement (Milinski, Semmann, & Krambeck, 2002). Other
research also demonstrated the social benefits of coordinated punishments to sustain cooperation
and prevent defection (Boyd, Gintis, & Bowles, 2010). The PTP borrows from this approach.
How are public figures rewarded for taking the pledge? Taking the pledge is a way of providing
credible information about the honesty of a public figure to an audience interested in such
information, thus providing a substantial reputational reward. When signing the pledge, each
public figure has an opportunity to provide a brief statement about why they took the pledge,
and some links to their online presence. This information will be stored in a publicly-accessible
database that anyone can access, such as constituents interested in evaluating political candidates
for office or deciding whether to trust the commentary of a media figure, policy expert, or
academic commenting on public affairs. Moreover, the statement would get sent in a regular
newsletter to all pledge signers who chose to subscribe to email updates. Doing so improves
that public figure’s reputation and gains them new supporters. The public figure can provide
additional content for the PTP newsletter about how the pledge changed their behavior, further
reinforcing both their reputation and providing proof for the PTP newsletter subscribers of
the effectiveness of the pledge, creating a virtuous cycle characteristic of successful innovations
(Casadesus-Masanell & Ricart, 2011).
Such provision of information has been crucial in successful interventions within the environmental
movement to address tragedies of the commons. As an example, research shows that labels
on household appliances that list comparisons of energy use and emissions most effectively
change behavior when consumers are already concerned with the environment but lack technical
knowledge about the appliances (Dietz, Ostrom, & Stern, 2003). Similarly, many consumers of
political information lack knowledge about which officials and media figures and analysts are
credible, and the PTP pledge provides that information.
Many may worry about the problem of false signaling or cheating – a public figure may take the
pledge to signal a commitment to the truth, without actually abiding by the pledge (Connelly,
Certo, Ireland, & Reutzel, 2010). Private citizens have little incentive to take their time and
share their personal data by filling out the pledge, making it likely that only those committed to
advancing the cause of truth in our society would take this action. However, the reputational
value for public figures of taking the pledge, especially as the PTP gains popularity and credibility
and also has a bigger email list, will grow higher and higher. If we do not prevent false signaling
and cheating on the pledge, the pledge will not be able to provide credible information and thus
fail to shift incentives to favor sharing accurate information instead of deception.
To address cheating, the pledge involves a monitoring mechanism that makes sure the pledge has
teeth in the form of reputational penalties which are commensurate with the infraction. Some
PTP advocates are assigned the duty of monitoring public figures. If an advocate suspects that
a public figure violated the pledge, the advocate will contact the individual privately, with an
approach of “innocent until reasonably shown guilty” perspective – perhaps the person misspoke,
or the advocate misunderstood. If the public figure withdraws the statement, or the advocate
If the advocate still thinks there might be a violation of the pledge, the advocate will then
escalate the matter to PTP mediating committee, depending on the stature of the public figure.
While anyone who signs up to the PTP may become an advocate, mediating committees are
composed of a group of vetted volunteers who will evaluate the evidence provided by the advocate,
contact the public figure for a chance to offer a defense, and make a ruling. If there is a ruling
of a violation, then this ruling is evaluated by a member of the PTP Central Coordinating
Committee, to ensure fairness and accuracy, and provide an external perspective. In the case
that the PTP Central Coordinating Committee member also determines that a violation has
occurred, the committee will then contact the public figure, offering the person a final chance
to retract the statement. If the public figure still refuses to take their words back, the PTP
mediating committee will then consider that the public figure has made a deliberate decision to
lie, and will rule the public figure to be in contempt of the pledge.
This process might sound a little convoluted, but it minimizes the possibility of the PTP being
politicized or corrupted at a local level, a concern raised by many in the formulation of the pledge.
Indeed, research on the environmental movement showed that for an institution such as the PTP
to succeed in gaining trust and credibility, it needs to demonstrate transparent, clear, and fair
rules and procedures where all participants have a chance to make their case and feel heard. For
instance, research on the California water shortage in 1991 showed that people cooperated with
drastic water-saving measures by local water authorities only if they believed these authorities
to listen to the concerns of all and provide clear, accurate, and unbiased information (Tyler &
Degoey, 1995).
Once someone is found to be in contempt of the pledge, the mediating committee will then
proceed to put reputational pressure on the individual to get that individual to change their
position on the matter. It would issue a press advisory to all relevant media – for instance, all
the media in the San Francisco area if the public figure is the mayor of San Francisco – that the
public figure is in contempt of the pledge. It will also issue an action alert to those who indicated
they want to receive such alerts – either at the local, regional, or national level, depending
on the stature of the public figure – for them to email, tweet, call, write, and protest in front
of the office of the public figure encouraging the person to revise the relevant statement, and
writing letters-to-the-editor about the situation. Finally, the public figure will be listed on the
PTP website as in contempt of the pledge. We anticipate that these consequences will provide
considerable reputation pressure for a public figure to avoid being in contempt of the pledge. If
the public figure envisions violating the pledge deliberately, they would be better off not signing
it at all. Thus, the pledge is not simply cheap talk, as it has strong reputational pressure behind
it.
So why should elected or appointed officials take the pledge if it restrains their activities and
causes them to make such statements retracting their posts? Officials need to be perceived as
trustworthy by citizens. The PTP provides that credibility, due to the presence of the monitoring
mechanism. Citizens can easily look them up in the PTP database. If the official has signed the
pledge a while ago and is not in contempt, the citizen can assume the official has not made any
deceptive statements without retracting them later. The official gets additional benefits because
when the official signs up, her information is included in the PTP updates. This provides the
official with positive reputation as being honest and credible, and gets them more support. There
is an additional benefit for elected officials whose opponent for office has not taken the PTP,
since the official can raise questions about why the opponent does not wish to take the pledge.
The PTP thus offers a first mover advantage for those public officials who take it early onward
(Kerin, Varadarajan, & Peterson, 1992).
Politicians are already taking the pledge, with over 20 having done so already, showing its
promise as a tool to shift incentives. For instance, here is a statement from one such politician,
the Democrat Dan Epstein:
As a progressive who has always valued learning to make our society better, as a
Democrat who believes in ethics and transparency in government and politics, as a
lifelong student and teacher who has always been devoted to the sciences, humanities,
and all forms of study, I will tell the truth, promote the truth, and live the truth. I will
stand against not only my opponents, but my own co-partisans if need be, to honor the
truth in the face of falsehood. I am running for the US House of Representatives in the
Texas 19th Congressional District in 2018. http://www.danepsteinforwesttexas.com/
I feel it is time to bring the country back together and this can not be done
the way congress is acting now in an us vs them mentality. Most congressmen
have only one goal and that is to get reelected. Congressmen will say whatever
they need to in order to accomplish that goal truth or not. I pledge to work
toward the truth and to be willing to speak the truth even if it is not in my best
interest politically. I am a Republican running for Congress in Ohio’s District 12:
https://www.facebook.com/Baumeister-for-Congress-1682557778660008/
As politicians, the two candidates know how to speak to different audiences. The statements
are specifically crafted to appeal to people who care about honesty. So we already see the
reputational incentives of the pledge working out for these two candidates.
What about policy experts, commentators, analysts, media figures, and scholars? They all need
to be perceived as trustworthy by the audiences to which they communicate. The PTP provides
them with that benefit due to the monitoring mechanism, and similarly to the officials described
above, the longer they are signed up without being in contempt, the more credibility they get.
Those who sign can also get a broader audience engaged with them since their information
will be included in the PTP updates. Moreover, if their competitors do not sign the pledge,
those who signed up will get a bigger audience, since audiences will start flocking to those
deemed more trustworthy sources of news/analysis/thought leadership. Thus, the first mover
advantage applies to these groups as well. Media figures are also taking the pledge, for example
a conservative radio and podcast host, John Wells. Here is his statement for the PTP newsletter
on taking the pledge:
The lifeblood of my program to which my name is attached and therefore all who I
call and who call me, friend, those who trust me to be honest with them, and most
importantly in the Earthly realm, my family rely on truthfulness in what I do. And of
supreme importance, God is watching. And listening. www.caravantomidnight.com
Similarly to the politicians, Wells’ statement is designed to get him appropriate reputation
rewards.
Liberal radio hosts are taking the pledge as well, for example Ethan Bearman, rated #57 talk
show host in the country by Talkers magazine and frequent guest on CNN and Fox. His statement
is as follows:
Facts matter and the truth matters. With the state of communications allowing any
bit of information, true or not, to instantly propagate across the globe, getting to the
truth is as hard as its been in my memory. There are people who prey on others with
falsehoods for monetary gain, political influence, and even pure malice. It is up to us to
make sure the truth shines through the clouds of falsehoods. www.ethanbearman.com
facebook.com/ethanbearmanshow twitter.com/ethanbearman Thank you! -Ethan
Bearman
Like the two politicians, both Wells and Bearman know how to craft their statements to target
an audience that cares about the truth, and get the appropriate reputation boost. Since both of
these talk show hosts announced their commitment to take the pledge on their programs, their
listeners are now holding them accountable, along with PTP advocates who are assigned to this
task.
The current best alternatives to advancing truth in our political system focus on supporting
the work of fact-checking organizations. Noble and worthwhile, these much-needed efforts
unfortunately do not address the underlying problem of distrust in fact-checking organizations.
For instance, according to a September 2016 Rasmussen Reports survey, only 29 percent of all
likely voters in the US trust fact-checking of candidates’ statements. The political disparity is
enormous, and in-line with previous reporting on the partisan divide – 88 percent of Trump
supporters do not trust fact-checkers, while 59 percent of Clinton supporters express trust for
fact-checkers (Reports, 2016). This distrust for fact-checkers will not be solved by providing
more fact-checking or faster, real-time fact-checking. Indeed, research shows that real-time
fact-checking may actually make people more resistant to correct information (Garrett & Weeks,
2013). Such distrust can only be addressed by getting citizens to both care more about the
truth and by providing credible information about who is truthful. The PTP aims to solve
these problems through appealing to people’s identities and getting them more emotionally
invested into truth-oriented behavior, while also providing them with information about who
are honest public figures. A secondary effect of the PTP may be to help legitimate trustworthy
fact-checking organizations. Indeed, research suggests that training in media literacy is likely
to reduce perceptions of bias by the media in reporting on controversial news stories, and the
behaviors of the PTP are conducive to higher media literacy (Vraga, Tully, & Rojas, 2009).
Of course, the Pro-Truth Pledge may not work despite the problems with the current best
alternatives. Virginity pledges have been shown consistently to delay the onset of sexual behavior
(Martino, Elliott, Collins, Kanouse, & Berry, 2008). However, other research has shown that STD
rates are comparable among those who took a virginity pledge and those who did not, potentially
due to lower rates of condom use and testing by those took the pledge (Brückner & Bearman,
2005). Thus, the PTP may have mixed results in getting people to avoid sharing misinformation.
Public figures may become afraid of signing on after a few suffered the reputational damage
that comes from being listed as in contempt of the pledge. Likewise, politicians, media venues,
and others who benefit from deceiving the voters will likely target the pledge as they see it
gain ground. To fend off these attacks, the pledge organizers must work hard to reach across
party lines to get diverse public figures from all sides of the political spectrum to commit to the
pledge, but this effort may or may not be successful. Another area of attack may be around
the definition of misinformation as used by the PTP, for instance regarding potential bias in
selecting fact-checking organizations. In part to ameliorate accusations of such bias, the PTP
specifically decided to use the same fact-checking organizations as Facebook uses, since Facebook
has a huge financial interest in using only the most high-quality fact-checking venues. Moreover,
the PTP – unlike fact-checking organizations – only evaluates those who have chosen to sign the
pledge; it is an opt-in mechanism, like the Better Business Bureau, as opposed to fact-checkers
who fact-check statements that the fact-checking organization finds relevant.
Another finding that might be potentially problematic for the effectiveness of the pledge shows
that citizens often use political figures they support as a guide to what they consider true or
false, regardless of the facts (Swire et al., 2017). Counteracting this tendency requires that
citizens develop trust and invest support into the Pro-Truth Pledge as a guiding mechanism
for candidates they consider credible. Indeed, a number of people who have chosen to take the
pledge have expressed that they would consider whether a candidate has taken the pledge a
strong factor in choosing which candidates to support with their votes, money, and time.
The PTP was launched in March 2017, and by March 11, 2018 had over 5800 pledge-takers. Of
them over 500 are public figures, including such prominent names as Peter Singer, Steven Pinker,
Michael Shermer, and Jonathan Haidt. Of these public figures, over 100 are public officials,
such as Member of US Congress Beto O’Rourke. There are also over 50 organizations, such as
Media Bias/Fact Check, The National Compass, Columbus Free Press, Fugitive Watch, and
Earth Organization for Sustainability. Online and in-person groups dedicated to the PTP have
emerged in over 20 US states, and are starting up in other states as well as abroad.
When asked for why they take the pledge, people generally report a desire to cast a vote against
fake news and demonstrate a personal commitment to honesty. Some also discuss the desire to
project a reputation as truth-tellers for the sake of gaining greater credibility among those with
whom they engage.
We have performed some follow-up conversations with pledge-takers to determine whether the
pledge impacted their behaviors. A private citizen, US Army veteran John Kirbow, stated how
after taking the pledge, he felt “an open commitment to a certain attitude” to “think hard when
I want to play an article or statistic which I’m not completely sold on.” He found the pledge
“really does seem to change one’s habits,” helping push him both to correct his own mistakes
with an “attitude of humility and skepticism, and of honesty and moral sincerity,” and also to
encourage “friends and peers to do so as well.” Christian pastor and community leader Lorenzo
Neal described how he “took the Pro-Truth Pledge because I expect our political leaders at
every level of government to speak truth and not deliberately spread misinformation to the
people they have been elected to serve. Having taken the pledge myself, I put forth the effort to
continually gather information validating stories and headlines before sharing them on my social
media outlets.”
All others who chose to participate in follow-up conversations shared similar responses. It is
important to note that follow-up conversations are limited by two factors: self-selection and
self-reporting. After all, the people likely to respond are those who find the pledge beneficial and
impactful. To address this concern, we also engaged in external observations of the behaviors of
pledge-takers, and have observed instances where the pledge was involved with people retracting
statements.
For instance, a candidate for Congress, Michael Smith, took the Pro-Truth Pledge (GoFundMe,
2017). He later posted on his Facebook wall a screenshot of a tweet by Donald Trump criticizing
minority and disabled children. After being called out on it, he went and searched Trump’s
feed. He could not find the original tweet, and while Trump may have deleted that tweet, the
candidate edited his own Facebook post to say that “Due to a Truth Pledge I have taken I
have to say I have not been able to verify this post” (Imgur, 2017). He indicated that he would
be more careful with future postings. In another case, Mark Kauffman, a photographer from
New York, shared an article from OccupyDemocrats.com, a site shown by credible fact-checkers
used by the PTP to be systematically unreliable. Other pledge-takers, following the behavior of
asking people to stop using unreliable sources regardless of the credibility of the article, asked
him to withdraw it, and he did so.
Such case studies of interviews and observations, while illuminating, would be stronger if
supported by more systematic quantitative data. Thus, we have conducted a survey evaluation
of pledge-takers to see whether their sharing of information on social media was impacted by the
pledge. We decided to target Facebook, as the most popular social media platform: 44 percent
of US adults got news via Facebook in 2016 (Gottfried & Shearer, 2016). Our hypothesis was
that taking the PTP will impact sharing on Facebook, both when people share news-relevant
content themselves on their own Facebook profile, and when they engage in other venues on
Facebook, such as Facebook groups or other people’s profiles. Examples of engaging in other
venues would include behaviors like asking people to retract incorrect statements, as was the
case with pledge-takers asking Michael Smith and Mark Kauffman to retract their statements.
To test this hypothesis, we have conducted a longitudinal study of people who took the PTP
and engage actively in sharing news-relevant content on Facebook. Since these people already
care about the truth – otherwise, they would presumably not take the pledge - any difference
between sharing behaviors before and after taking the pledge can be attributed to finding out
about the pledge and taking it.
Method
We had participants fill out Likert scale (1-5) surveys self-reporting their Facebook engagement
with news-relevant content on their own profiles and also with other people’s posts and in groups
before and after they took the pledge. The specific questions asked were in the form of the
following:
Before you heard about the Pro-Truth Pledge, to what extent did your behavior
on your personal Facebook profile align with the Pro-Truth Pledge’s 12 behaviors?
Please give an estimate of 1 to 5, with 1 at lowest level of alignment to 5 being
full alignment. Lowest alignment means sharing misinformation. Highest alignment
means actively fighting lies and promoting truth. Remember that in this question,
you are evaluating only your behavior on your personal profile, not your behavior in
groups or in response to other people’s posts.
All other questions followed a similar format. We asked a separate question about whether study
participants wanted to clarify any aspects of the questions, and no one reported being confused
by the questions.
To avoid the Hawthorne effect of study participants being impacted by observation, the study
did not evaluate current behavior, but past behavior. We only recruited participants who took
the pledge 4 or more weeks ago to fill out the survey, and asked them about their behavior
after taking the pledge. Giving them this period also gave people an opportunity to have the
immediate impact of taking the pledge fade from their mind, thus enabling an evaluation of the
medium-term impact of the PTP on sharing news-relevant content. We recruited participants via
Facebook posts and emails to people who took the pledge and were interested in receiving pledge
updates soliciting participation in a study about the pledge, and participants were not given
any incentives to participate. With these limitations, we were able to secure 24 participants.
This study method was informed by the approaches used by studies of whether honor codes
address cheating, which is the most comparable form of intervention to the PTP. Such studies
similarly rely on self-reporting by students on whether they have cheated or not cheated (McCabe
& Trevino, 1993; McCabe et al., 1999). Similarly, studies of whether virginity pledges delay
sexual onset similarly reply on self-reporting (Brückner & Bearman, 2005). Thus, our method
of evaluating the PTP faces the same problems faced by those studies: self-reporting and
self-selection. Regarding the former, we cannot be certain whether, despite the clarity of the
questions to the participants and the clarity of the behaviors outlined in the pledge, the study
subjects gave accurate evaluations of themselves. Regarding the latter, there is a possibility
that some people who failed to uphold the virginity pledge or the honor code might have chosen
to avoid participating in studies of the impact of these interventions. However, given that
these studies of honor codes and virginity pledges have been acknowledged as appropriate and
influential in the literature despite the potential problems of self-reporting and self-selection, we
have chosen to use a similar methodology to test a similar intervention.
Results
Our results show that taking the pledge results in a statistically significant increase in alignment
with the behaviors of the pledge, both on one’s own profile on Facebook and when interacting
with other people’s posts and in groups. Specifically, on one’s own Facebook profile, the median
alignment with the PTP score before taking the PTP is 4 (SD=1.14), and the median alignment
score after taking the PTP is 4.5 (SD=0.51). We conducted an Asymptotic Wilcoxon-Pratt
Signed-Rank Test to compare PTP alignment on one’s own profile before and after taking the
PTP. The null hypothesis for the test states that there is no significant score difference before
and after taking the pledge and the alternative hypothesis proposes a significant difference. The
results reveal a significant increase of PTP alignment after taking the pledge with a large effect
size; z = 6.12, p < 0.000, r = 0.88. Based on the p-values, the null hypotheses can be rejected
and the alternative hypothesis is accepted. These results suggest that taking the pledge really
does influence alignment on one’s own profile. The upper part of figure 2 represents the results
visually.
For engaging with news-worthy content on other people’s profiles, the median PTP alignment
score before taking the Truth Pledge is 3.5 (SD=1.06). The median PTP alignment score after
taking the Truth Pledge is 4.5 (SD=0.65). As before, we conducted an Asymptotic Wilcoxon-
Pratt Signed-Rank Test to compare alignment in groups and other people’s profiles before and
after taking the Truth Pledge. The results show a significant increase of Truth Pledge Alignment
after taking the pledge with a large effect size; z = 6.11, p < 0.000, r = 0.88. Again, the null
hypothesis can be rejected and the alternative hypothesis is accepted.
These results suggest that taking the Truth Pledge really does influence Truth Pledge Alignment
in groups and on other people’s posts. The lower part of figure 2 represents the results visually.
For sharing content on their own profile, 70.83% of participants (17 of 24 respondents) reported an
increase of their PTP alignment after taking the PTP, eleven participants increased by one point
on the alignment scale, five by two points, one by three points, while the rest maintained the same
score. For sharing content in groups and on other people’s walls, again, 70.83% of participants
reported an increase of their PTP alignment after taking the PTP, twelve participants increased
by one point on the alignment scale, five by two, while the rest maintained their initial score.
These results indicate that taking the PTP indeed significantly improves social media sharing,
and thus the PTP is an effective intervention for addressing the scourge of fake news. The results
also contradict the hypothesis that all those who take the PTP are already honest and that
taking the pledge is simply a way to signal their honesty publicly. If that was the case, there
would be no statistically significant increase in alignment with the truth-oriented behaviors in
the PTP before and after taking the pledge.
Moreover, if we look at Figure 2 we see that about half of the survey participants were actually
at 3 or below for the quality of their Facebook engagement before taking the pledge, and thus
can hardly be called truth-oriented. It is only after taking the pledge that they improved their
behavior. In fact, all study participants who scored at 3 or below reported some improvements
in their behavior to align more with the pledge after taking it.
This study does not tell us whether the difference in sharing behaviors can be attributed simply
to finding out about the pledge, or specifically to taking the pledge. Thus, the actual intervention
we are measuring is the combination of “finding out about and taking the pledge” as opposed
to the more fine-grained intervention of taking the pledge after finding out about it, or finding
out about the pledge without taking it. While it may be an interesting question of whether
just finding out about the pledge makes a difference in Facebook sharing behavior, or whether
it’s a matter both of finding out about the pledge and taking it, we had no reasonable way of
reaching out and recruiting the many people who heard about the pledge without taking it.
Moreover, from the perspective of social impact, it makes little difference: if finding out about
the pledge and taking it is an effective intervention to decrease sharing misinformation, we can
still ethically recommend encouraging people to learn about and take the pledge regardless of
our lack of certainty about whether the actual mechanism involves just one or both components.
A weakness of the first study was its reliance on self-reporting. While a well-established academic
method for studying behavior change, it has the weakness of being vulnerable to people’s
internal conceptions of themselves influencing their self-evaluations. After all, if someone took
the Pro-Truth Pledge, they might be more likely to believe they were acting in accordance
with the pledge – regardless of whether the PTP actually changed their behavior. Thus, while
self-reporting is indicative of behavior change, we should not perceive it as conclusive evidence
of the PTP’s effectiveness. To evaluate more accurately whether the PTP actually results in
behavior change requires external observers to evaluate behavior change. Our second study
involved enrolling some participants of the first study into a new study, where their behavior on
Facebook was observed and coded by how well it aligned with the PTP. Thus, we could evaluate
whether their self-reporting of behavior change correlated with actual behavior change. The
second study included 21 people.
Method
Similarly to the first study, the second study avoided the Hawthorne effect of study participants
being impacted by observation by evaluating past behavior. Study participants granted access
to their Facebook profile to researchers, enabling researchers to take advantage of the Facebook
Timeline feature to evaluate posts made by study participants after they took the pledge. Thus,
the quality of sharing by study participants was not impacted by them knowing they were being
observed, since they enrolled in the study after they already made the relevant Facebook posts
that the researchers evaluated.
Researchers looked at the first ten Facebook posts with news-relevant content made four weeks
after the pledge. The four week window enabled the initial impact of taking the pledge to fade
from the minds of pledge-takers. Then, the researchers compared these ten posts to the first ten
posts for the same period the year before the study participant took the pledge. The aim was to
correct for any calendar-based differences in someone’s Facebook sharing: for example, if the
pledge-taker is a college student, they might do different types of sharing when they were taking
classes vs. when they were on break. So if someone took the pledge on May 1, 2017, then the
post-pledge sharing evaluation period began on May 29, 2017, and the evaluators looked at the
first 10 posts made on and after that day. The pre-pledge sharing evaluation period began on
May 29, 2016, and the evaluators looked at the first 10 news-relevant posts made on and after
that day.
There were two coders who coded the posts of each of the 21 study participants, 10 before the
participant took the pledge and 10 afterward, for a total of 420 individual pieces of data. The
sharing was coded according to quality, from 1 of lowest level of alignment with the PTP, to 5
of highest alignment. Lowest alignment meant the content is misinformation, whether a news
article or meme or personal post with news relevance. Highest alignment meant that the post
actively promotes fighting lies and promoting truth. The coders evaluated both the post and
the person’s engagement in comments on that post as a total rating for each individual post.
The point of making a total rating for each post - both the post and the person’s engagement -
is to approximate the impact of the person with each post on their social media followers, since
the followers will pay attention both to the original post, and the comments on the post. The
guidelines were as follows:
2: the content is accurate, but comes from an unreliable source, even if the post
itself does not contain misinformation.
Results
It is important to evaluate inter-coder reliability between the two coders, and a typical approach
to this is to calculate Krippendorff’s α, a measurement of agreement among coders of data,
designed to indicate their reliability. It ranges from 0 to 1, whereas 0 indicates no agreement
between the coders and 1 indicates perfect agreement. Strong coder reliability is indicated by
α ≥ .800, and in cases where it is acceptable to have more tentative conclusions, α ≥ .667 is at
the lowest acceptable limit (Krippendorff, 2004). The α for the two coders was .85, suggesting
a good inter-coder reliability. We can assume that both of the coders agreed substantially on
whether a Facebook post was in alignment with the Pro-Truth Pledge.
To evaluate the data, we took the average coding between the two coders, which left us with a
single estimate per person per post (21 Truth-Pledge alignment scores before, and 21 scores after
taking the Pro-Truth Pledge). Following this, a few checks were run to see whether the data meets
the statistical assumptions for a paired t-test: 1.) normal distribution of the relevant variable
and 2.) homogeneity of variance. To evaluate the first assumption, we conducted a Shapiro-Wilk
test, and found that the data does not significantly differ from a normal distribution, W = 0.95,
p-value = 0.08.
Following that, we conducted a Levene-Test to assess the homogeneity of variance. The test
showed a p-value greater than 0.05, indicating that there is no significant difference in variances
between the groups F = 4.069, p-value = 0.05. Thus, we can assume homogeneity of variance.
Given that the statistical assumptions are met, a paired t-test can be estimated in order to
examine whether Pro-Truth Pledge Alignment is significantly different after taking the PTP.
The data can be seen in the table below:
Table 1: Descriptive Statistics of Data from the Second Study
Time N Mean SD
1 Before Truth-Pledge 21 2.49 0.60
2 After Truth-Pledge 21 3.65 0.41
3 Total 42 3.07 0.78
A paired-samples t-test was conducted to compare Pro Truth-Pledge Alignment before and
after taking the Pro-Truth Pledge. There was a significant difference in the scores for Pledge
Alignment before (M=2.49, SD=0.6) and after (M=3.65, SD=0.41) taking the PTP; t(20) =
-8.86, p < 0.001. An estimation of the effect size indicates that the found difference can be
considered to be large (Cohen’s d=-1.93). These results suggest that taking the PTP really does
have an effect on inducing truthful sharing behavior on Facebook.
The figure above provides a visualization of the results. The thick black line shows the median.
The small colored lines represent change among individuals. Note that every individual who
took the PTP has improved their sharing on Facebook to be more aligned with the PTP, some
drastically.
Discussion
The first study showed that individuals self-report behaving more truthfully both on their own
profiles and in other contexts on Facebook – such as on the profiles of friends and in groups –
after taking the PTP. The improvement was large, with a clear statistical significance, of about
1 unit on a 1-5 scale. The second study focused on observing people’s behavior on their own
profiles, and confirmed that pledge-takers behaved more truthfully four weeks after taking the
pledge. Again, the improvement had clear statistical significance, and was large, also about 1
unit on a 1-5 scale. In other words, people’s self-reports about their improvement of behavior
on their own profiles – and the extent of their improvement – were corroborated by external
observers. We can thus assume that people also behaved more truthfully on other people’s
profiles and in groups, even though we have no realistic way of observing that. Overall, these
two studies provide compelling evidence that people improved the honesty of their behavior on
Facebook because they have heard about and signed the pledge, and there is no reason to believe
they would have improved if they did not hear about and sign the pledge. The combination of
these two studies provides solid evidence that taking the PTP decreases the spread
of misinformation on social media.
By extension, the same finding implies that pledge-takers practice more truthful behavior in
other areas of their civic engagement. Further research is needed to determine whether that is
indeed the case. We also do not know whether presenting the PTP in a semi-voluntary context,
such as when students are presented with an honor code with an implicit expectation that they
sign it in order to attend the college of their choice, will maintain the impact of the PTP: further
research is needed as well.
Conclusion
To solve the problem of private citizens sharing fake news and public figures engaging in
deception to win and maintain power, we need techno-cognitive solutions, meaning ones that
combine technology with psychological principles, according to prominent researchers in the
field. The Pro-Truth Pledge, which combines psychology research with online mechanisms of
implementation and propagation, and crowd-sources fact-checking, is one such intervention. It
asks participants to commit to twelve behaviors, which are intended to counteract a number of
cognitive biases that contribute to people believing in and sharing misinformation, an essential
aspect of the psychology research informing the content of the pledge itself.
In addition to committing to the behaviors of the pledge, pledge-takers are encouraged to share
about taking the pledge on their social media, to put markers of taking the pledge on their
online profiles, and to fact-check other pledge-takers, which is the crowd-sourcing component of
the pledge. The PTP uses all four components shown by psychology research on environmental
pollution as crucial to addressing tragedies of the commons (Milinsk, Semmann and Krambeck
2002, Van Vugt 2009). It provides information about the credibility of those who sign it, as well
as information about what it means to orient toward the truth and what constitutes credible
information sources. It appeals to the identity of people to desire to be honest and be perceived
that way. Finally, it offers positive reputational rewards for honesty, taking advantage of the
psychology research on incentives.
This techno-cognitive solution has shown some early signs of effectiveness. To be effective
requires that: 1) we see evidence of people taking the pledge, and 2) we see evidence of people
abiding by the behaviors of the pledge. We have clear evidence of people taking the pledge
when they find out about it through venues like coverage by prominent media, through personal
outreach, through word-of-mouth interactions on social media, and other means.
We also have growing evidence of its effectiveness in bringing about behavior change. Case
studies indicate that at least some pledge-takers are moved to change their behavior after the
pledge, including public figures. Two studies show that pledge-takers behave more truthfully on
Facebook several weeks after taking the pledge. One of these studies relies on self-reporting, and
another study relied on external observation of participants. In both cases, there was a large,
statistically significant improvement in alignment with PTP behavior lasting for more than four
weeks after subjects took the pledge. Further research needs to be done to test the effectiveness
of this impact. In the meantime, this data suggests the pledge is valuable, and it is beneficial to
encourage the widespread adoption of the Pro-Truth Pledge by all citizens and public figures
who care about addressing the problem of fake news and post-truth politics.
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