SPSP2023で発表を行います

2023年2月23日～25日にかけて開催されるThe 24th Annual Meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP2023)で、以下の発表を行います。

Research spotlight

Chen, J. & Igarashi, T. (2023). Altruism drives us to share accurate, not fake, information about COVID-19 vaccines: An experimental study in Japan. Paper presented at the 24th Annual Meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Atlanta, USA

Given the rise of misinformation spread during the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccine hesitancy has been one of the main threats to global health. Recent research argues that altruistic motivation promotes sharing fake news on social media (Apuke & Omar, 2021), but this relies on post-hoc self-reports on one’s past online activities. It is also unclear if the patterns of sharing news information with others triggered by altruistic motivation differ across the properties of news contents, the targets for sharing, and the media to communicate. A total of 102 Japanese undergraduates participated in an online experiment. Participants read four news articles: two were accurate-positive/accurate-negative articles on COVID-19 vaccination for kids with scientific evidence; one was a fake-negative article on it; and one was a vaccine-unrelated article. Participants rated how much they would like to share each article with different targets (e.g., family/strangers) via different communication media (e.g., in-person/social media). Overall, participants high in altruistic motivation were more likely to share accurate-positive news information with others but less likely to share fake-negative, accurate-negative, and vaccine-unrelated news information. These findings provide new evidence that altruistic motivation promotes sharing accurate, not fake, information with others.