Fake news can foster political polarization, foment division between groups, and encourage malicious behavior. Misinformation has cast doubt on the integrity of democratic elections, downplayed the serious- ness of COVID-19, and increased vaccine hesitancy. Given the leading role that online groups play in the dissemination of fake news, in this research we examined how group-level factors contribute to sharing mis- information. By unobtrusively tracking interactions among 51,537 Twitter user dyads longitudinally over two time periods (n = 103,074), we found that group members who did not conform to the behavior of other group members by sharing fake news were subjected to reduced social interaction over time. We aug- mented this unique, ecologically valid behavioral data with another digital field study (N = 178,411) and five experiments to disentangle some of the causal mechanisms driving the observed effects. We found that social costs were higher for not sharing fake news versus other content, that specific types of deviant group members faced the greatest social costs, and that social costs explained fake news sharing above and beyond partisan identity and subjective accuracy assessments. Overall, our work illuminates the role of conformity pressure as a critical antecedent of the spread of misinformation.

Punishments are not always administered immediately after a crime is committed. Although scholars and researchers claim that third parties should normatively enact punishments proportionate to a given crime, we contend that third parties punish transgressors more severely when there is a time delay between a transgressor’s crime and when they face punishment for it. We theorize that this occurs because of a perception of unfairness, whereby third parties view the process that led to time delays as unfair. We tested our theory across eight studies, including two archival data sets of 160,772 punishment decisions and six experiments (five preregistered) across 6,029 adult participants. Our results suggest that as time delays lengthen, third parties punish transgressors more severely because of increased perceived unfairness. Importantly, perceived unfairness explained this relationship beyond other alternative mechanisms. We explore potential boundary conditions for this relationship and discuss the implications of our findings.

Leaders strive to encourage helping behaviors among employees, as it positively affects both organizational and team effectiveness. However, the manner in which a leader influences others can unintentionally limit this desired behavior. Drawing on social learning theory, we contend that a leader’s tendency to influence others via dominance could decrease employees’ interpersonal helping. Dominant leaders, who influence others by being assertive and competitive, shape their subordinates’ cognitive schema of success based on zero-sum thinking. Employees with a zero-sum mindset are more likely to believe that they can only make progress at the expense of others. We further propose that this zero-sum mindset results in less interpersonal helping among subordinates. We test our hypotheses by employing different operationalizations of our key variables in eight studies of which four are reported in the manuscript and another four in supplementary information (SI) across a combined sample of 147,780 observations. These studies include a large archival study, experiments with both laboratory and online samples, and a time-lagged field study with employees from 50 different teams. Overall, this research highlights the unintended consequences that dominant leaders have on their followers’ helping behavior by increasing their zero-sum mindset.

Sharing of misinformation can be catastrophic, especially during times of national importance. Typically studied in political contexts, sharing of fake news has been positively linked with conservative political ideology. However, such sweeping generalizations run the risk of increasing already rampant political polarization. We offer a more nuanced account by proposing that the sharing of fake news is largely driven by low conscientiousness conservatives. At high levels of conscientiousness there is no difference between liberals and conservatives. We find support for our hypotheses in the contexts of Covid-19, political, and neutral news across 8 studies (six pre-registered; two conceptual replications) with 4,642 participants and 91,144 unique participant-news observations. A general desire for chaos explains the interactive effect of political ideology and conscientiousness on the sharing of fake news. Furthermore, our findings indicate the inadequacy of fact-checker interventions to deter the spread of fake news. This underscores the challenges associated with tackling fake news, especially during a crisis like Covid-19 where misinformation impairs the ability of governments to curtail the pandemic.

Are Uber drivers just a collection of independent workers, or a meaningful part of Uber’s workforce? Do the owners of Holiday Inn franchises around the world seem more like a loosely knit group, or more like a cohesive whole? These questions examine perceptions of organization members’ entitativity, the extent to which individuals appear to comprise a single, unified entity. We propose that the public’s perception that an organization’s members are highly entitative can be a double-edged sword for the organization. On one hand, perceiving an organization’s members as highly entitative makes the public more attracted to the organization because people associate entitativity with competence. On the other hand, perceiving members as highly entitative leads the public to blame the organization and its leadership for an individual member’s wrongdoing, because the public infers that the organization and its leadership tacitly condoned the wrongdoing. Two experiments and a field survey, plus thee supplemental studies, support these propositions. Moving beyond academic debates about whether theories should treat an organization as a unified entity, these results demonstrate the importance of understanding how much the public does perceive an organization as a unified entity. As the changing nature of work enables loosely-knit collections of individuals to hold membership in the same organization, entitativity perceptions may become increasingly consequential.

When actors transgress social norms, their social status colors the severity with which they are punished. While some argue that high-status transgressors attract severe punishment when accused of ambiguous transgressions, others contend the opposite. In this paper, we attempt to reconcile this theoretical inconsistency. We propose that the capacity for social status to color third-party judgments of transgressions may depend on the status type of high-status actors. Drawing on the evolutionary theory of dominance and prestige as two alternate forms of status within social hierarchies, we suggest that actors associated with dominance-based status will be penalized more harshly than actors whose status is based on prestige. Across multiple studies employing archival field data, controlled lab experiments, and different instantiations of dominance, prestige, and misconduct, we consistently demonstrate that high-status dominant actors are punished more harshly than their prestigious counterparts. Further, we find that attributions of intentionality and lack of moral credentials explain the harsher punishments meted out to dominant (versus prestigious) high-status actors. In this way, we provide both a parsimonious reconciliation of the inconsistency in the extant literature and a theoretical explanation of how status type of high-status actors differentially impacts the judgment, decisions, and behaviors of third parties.

Jockeying and competing for higher status is an inherent feature of rank-ordered hierarchies. Despite theoretically acknowledging rank changes within hierarchies, the extant literature has ignored the role of competitors’ dynamic movements on a focal actor’s resulting behavior. By using a dynamic lens to examine these movement in competitive situations, we examine how positive change in a competitor’s rank—that is, positive status momentum—affects a focal actor’s psychology and resulting performance. We consider the real-world contexts of chess tournaments (5.2 million observations) and professional tennis (117,749 matches) and find that a focal actor’s performance in both cognitive and physical competitions is negatively impacted when facing a competitor with positive momentum. Additionally, four experimental studies reveal that a competitor’s positive momentum results in the focal actor’s positive projection of the competitor’s future rank, which in turn increases the psychological threat for the actor. Collectively, our findings advance the social hierarchy literature by helping to elucidate the manner in which rank-ordered hierarchies are negotiated and disrupted over time.

When someone expresses prejudice against an outgroup, how negatively do we judge the prejudiced individual and his or her ingroup? Previous lines of research suggest that the answer depends on the ingroup’s entitativity––i.e., how cohesive it is––but they make different predictions about whether entitativity should increase or decrease outside observers’ negative reactions to prejudice. We resolve this tension by demonstrating divergent consequences of entitativity for prejudiced individuals versus their groups. Mediational and experimental data from six studies (two pre- registered; N = 2,455) support two hypotheses: Entitativity increases how responsible the group seems for its member’s prejudice, which in turn decreases how unacceptable observers find the member’s behavior and how much they condemn her (H1), but which also increases how much they condemn the group (H2). Thus, entitativity can grant individuals a license to express prejudice but can damage their group’s reputation.

Across the globe we witness the rise of populist authoritarian leaders who are overbearing in their narrative, aggressive in behavior, and often exhibit questionable moral character. Drawing on evolutionary theory of leadership emergence, in which dominance and prestige are seen as dual routes to leadership, we provide a situational and psychological account for when and why dominant leaders are preferred over other respected and admired candidates. We test our hypothesis using three studies, encompassing more than 140,000 participants, across 69 countries and spanning the past two decades. We find robust support for our hypothesis that under a situational threat of economic uncertainty (as exemplified by the poverty rate, the housing vacancy rate, and the unemployment rate) people escalate their support for dominant leaders. Further, we find that this phenomenon is mediated by participants’ psychological sense of a lack of personal control. Together, these results provide large-scale, globally representative evidence for the structural and psychological antecedents that in- crease the preference for dominant leaders over their prestigious counterparts.

Direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising of pharmaceutical drugs is often cited as the culprit for inflated patient demand for advertised drugs. Further to this economic concern, we provide an evidence-based psychological account of another concern that warrants the re-examination of the merits of DTC advertising of prescription drugs. Across six experiments and a sample of 3,059 US participants, we find reliable evidence for the argument dilution effect. Specifically, when commercials list severe side effects along with those that are most frequent (which include both serious and minor side effects), as required by the Food and Drug Administration, it dilutes consumers’ judgements of the overall severity of the side effects, compared with when only the serious side effects are listed. Furthermore, consumers’ reduced judgement of severity leads to greater attraction to those drugs. In regulating pharmaceutical advertisements, the Food and Drug Administration appear to have paradoxically dampened consumers’ judgements of overall severity and risk, and increased the marketability of these drugs.

We propose that promotive voice, or the expression of suggestions for improving work practices in the organization, and prohibitive voice, or the expression of warnings about factors that can harm the organization, are differentially influenced by employees’ dispositional inclination to be approach and avoidance oriented. Drawing on multisource survey data from 291 employees and their managers, we found that approach orientation had positive relationship with promotive voice and negative relationship with prohibitive voice. By contrast, avoidance orientation had positive relationship with prohibitive voice and negative relationship with promotive voice. Further, voice role expectations, or employees’ beliefs about the extent to which a particular form of voice is expected from them in their daily work, moderated the effects of approach and avoidance orientations. Highlighting the unique nature of voice as a behavior that is especially sensitive to situational cues, the effects of approach and avoidance orientations on promotive and prohibitive voice were stronger when role expectations for that form of voice were weaker. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.