Moral Alignment Shapes Responses to Shared Content

Abstract

The spread of misinformation has become a major concern to society, particularly in the age of social media. We show here that aligning online messages with audiences' core moral values leads to increased sharing, independent of message veracity, message familiarity, and users' analytical thinking ability. The results suggest that misinformation is driven by motivational factors, such as alignment with one's core moral values, above and beyond cognitive factors. Our findings further indicate the susceptibility of audiences to manipulation via simple framing strategies, their potential use in targeted misinformation campaigns, and thus the need to develop effective countermeasures.