Why would people share news they think might not be accurate? We identify a factor that, alongside accuracy, drives the sharing of true and fake news: the 'interestingness-if-true' of a piece of news. In three pre-registered experiments (N = 904), participants were presented with a series of true and fake news, and asked to rate the accuracy of the news, how interesting the news would be if it were true, and how likely they would be to share it. Participants were more willing to share news they found more interesting-if-true, as well as news they deemed more accurate. They deemed fake news less accurate but more interesting-if-true than true news, and were more likely to share true news than fake news. As expected, interestingnessif-true differed from interestingness and accuracy, and had good face validity. Higher trust in mass media was associated with a greater ability to discern true from fake news, and participants rated as more accurate news that they had already been exposed to (especially for true news). We argue that people may not share news of questionable accuracy by mistake, but instead because the news has qualities that compensate for its potential inaccuracy, such as being interesting-if-true.

Due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, covering the mouth region with a face mask became pervasive in many regions of the world, potentially impacting how people communicate with and around children. To explore the characteristics of this masked communication, we asked nursery school educators, who have been at the forefront of daily masked interaction with children, about their perception of daily communicative interactions while wearing a mask in an online survey. We collected data from French and Japanese nursery school educators to gain an understanding of commonalities and differences in communicative behavior with face masks given documented cultural differences in pre-pandemic mask wearing habits, face scanning patterns, and communicative behavior. Participants (177 French and 138 Japanese educators) reported a perceived change in their own communicative behavior while wearing a mask, with decreases in language quantity and increases in language quality and non-verbal cues. Comparable changes in their team members’ and children’s communicative behaviors were also reported. Moreover, our results suggest that these changes in educators’ communicative behaviors are linked to their attitudes toward mask wearing and their potential difficulty in communicating following its use. These findings shed light on the impact of pandemic-induced mask wearing on children’s daily communicative environment.

Could there be upsides to rudely challenging people’s positions? If no one calls out the speaker of a challenging or offensive statement, it might be because the audience is afraid to challenge the speaker, thereby suggesting the speaker holds a dominant position. In two experiments (N = 635), participants read vignettes in which a speaker uttered a statement that was challenging (it directly clashed with the audience’s prior views) or unchallenging (it agreed with the audience’s prior views). We also manipulated whether the audience accepted or rejected the statement after it was uttered. In Experiment 1 the statements were about mundane topics, while in Experiment 2 the statements were offensive. In both experiments, speakers uttering challenging statements that the audience nonetheless accepted were deemed more dominant and more likely to be the boss of the audience members. This shows that people use audience reactions to challenging statements to infer dominance, and suggests that people might use the utterance of challenging statements to demonstrate their dominance.