Professor Luke Smillie and Associate Professor Piers Howe

Reducing the Spread of False Information on Social Media - Piers Howe

There is increasing pressure on social media companies to restrict the propagation of false information on their platforms. However, it has become apparent that their tool of choice, fact checking, is not viable. It is too slow, too costly and it is often unclear what the truth is. On this basis, social media companies have argued that it is not possible for them to police their own platforms and therefore it is not reasonable to expect them to do so. They further argue that they should not be the arbiters of truth and freedom of speech is paramount. Here we promote an alternative to fact checking that is fast, scalable, inexpensive and doesn’t require social media platforms to be the arbiters of truth. Better still, it doesn’t impinge on freedom of speech, so is consistent with our democratic principles. We propose a self-certification procedure where users are alerted that a social media post that they have attempted to share may be inaccurate and are prompted to confirm that they believe it is accurate before being allowed to share it. In this way, users are allowed to share all the posts that they believe are true, so their freedom of speech is not infringed. Despite not censoring what they are allowed to share, we show that this procedure significantly reduces the amount of false information shared on a social media platform. This procedure can be realised with today’s technology and belies the claims of social media companies that they are unable to police their own platforms. Better still, it puts the social media users themselves in the driver’s seat, making them the arbiters of the truth.

About Associate Professor Piers Howe

Piers Howe is an Associate Professor in the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences. His research focuses on mitigating the effects of mis- and disinformation. He is a co-chair of the University of Melbourne Information and Influence hub and is a co-chair of the University of Melbourne Hallmark Research Initiative: Fighting Harmful Online Communication.

Personality traits and situational factors as predictors of dishonest behaviour - Luke Smillie

Previous research shows that both stable personality traits and transient situational factors predict dishonest behaviour. For instance, trait Honesty-Humility predicts lower rates of lying/cheating, and people appear to lie/cheat more readily when the situation enables them to self-justify behaving dishonestly. As these effects are usually studied in isolation, their relative strength and potential interdependence remains unclear. Across five preregistered studies totalling ~2,500 participants, we examined effects of several personality traits and three manipulations of self-justifiability of lying—observed counterfactuals (Shalvi et al., 2011), normative information (Huber et al., 2022), and pledging to be honest (Zickfeld et al., 2024)—on cheating within an incentivised game. Effects of personality traits were generally stronger and more consistent than effects of situational manipulations, and none of our studies yielded a significant trait x situation interaction. Our findings may inform efforts to reduce dishonest behaviour, although caution is warranted given some methodological challenges encountered in this research.

About Professor Luke Smillie

Professor Luke Smillie completed his PhD at the University of Queensland and held two Postdoctoral Fellowships at the University of London before accepting a position at The University of Melbourne, where he directs the Personality Processes Lab. His research in personality psychology has focussed on topics such as prosocial behaviour, moral traits, wellbeing, reward processing, and personality structure/assessment.

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