If you have an account on a social media platform, then chances are, you have probably reshared something with your network that someone else shared first. It might be a meme, a good joke, or a news story. That tendency to share content has a potential dark side because it can lead to the spread of misinformation.
For this reason, it is valuable to understand the factors that drive people to share news stories they encounter on social media. In particular, it would be useful to know whether those factors drive the sharing of misinformation, defined as stories that contain significant false information.
This was explored in a 2025 paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General by a group of 10 authors led by Suhaib Abdurahman from the University of Southern California. They were interested in the relationship between a social media post and the recipient’s moral values.
In their studies, they looked at issues that had a potential political dimension to take advantage of observations about differences in values between people who identify as liberal and those who identify as conservative. In particular, people who identify as liberal often have individualizing values in which they prize care for others and equality. In contrast, those who identify as conservative often have binding values in which they prize loyalty, patriotism, and authority.
They developed social media posts that shared a link to a news article that might be a true article or might be one that spreads misinformation. The text on the post either focused on an individualizing value, a binding value, or had a value-neutral intro.
In one study, participants were shown several posts framed with one or another value (or the neutral control) and were asked whether they would share this post with others. They were also given a values questionnaire that would assess the degree to which they held individualizing and binding values. The neutral control condition helped to assess the degree to which the headline was one people would want to share regardless of the framing of the post.
This study (which was replicated in a second study in the paper) found that people were more likely to share a particular article when the value expressed in the post matched a value that they held than when it expressed a value they did not hold. Interestingly, this influence was particularly strong for articles that contained misinformation, suggesting that this match between a person’s values and the social media post can drive the sharing of false information.
One of the studies in this series explored whether the match between a person’s values and those expressed in the social media post led people to deliberate more (or less) about the post. It did not. In addition, people’s tendency to think analytically did not influence the size of this effect.
A final study looked at actual posts on Twitter. This study looked at the degree of engagement and sharing of those posts. It classified the person posting the information as relatively conservative or liberal based on the accounts the person followed, under the assumption that people tend to follow others with similar political leanings to themselves. They used machine learning to classify the content of a post as containing a binding value, an individualizing value, or being neutral. While most links were shared with a framing that was neutral, there were some examples of posts with binding and individualizing values. In general, liberal accounts got more engagement when their posts were framed with an individualizing value than with a binding value, while conservative accounts got more engagement when their posts were framed with a binding value than with an individualizing value, suggesting that the results of the laboratory studies translated to the real world.
This work explains the sharing of misinformation. People feel good about posts that mesh with their deeply-held values. That good feeling may drive a sense that other people would benefit from seeing the post as well. This compatibility of a post with values may overcome people’s tendency to want to ensure the information they share is accurate.
In an era in which social media companies are not vetting the content posted on their platforms, these tendencies to share misinformation create an environment in which many people are likely to be walking around with false beliefs. And because sharing is also influenced by values associated with political leanings, it means that most people with strong political beliefs are likely to have those beliefs reinforced in part by misinformation.
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