A comparison of support schemes for market-based deployment of renewable energy in the UK and Germany shows that the feed-in tariff reduces costs to consumers and results in larger deployment. A ...survey among project developers suggests two explanations: (1) Site selection presents the biggest obstacle under the feed-in tariff. Uncertain financing of other schemes reduces efforts at initial project stages and planning permits become a major obstacle. (2) Project developers do not compete in price but for good sites under the feed-in tariff. Most importantly, turbine producers and construction services contribute to most of the costs, and face at least equal levels of competition under the feed-in tariff.
Misinformation on social media is a pervasive challenge. In this study (N = 415) a social-media simulation was used to test two potential interventions for countering misinformation: a credibility ...badge and a social norm. The credibility badge was implemented by associating accounts, including participants', with a credibility score. Participants' credibility score was dynamically updated depending on their engagement with true and false posts. To implement the social-norm intervention, participants were provided with both a descriptive norm (i.e., most people do not share misinformation) and an injunctive norm (i.e., sharing misinformation is the wrong thing to do). Both interventions were effective. The social-norm intervention led to reduced belief in false claims and improved discrimination between true and false claims. It also had some positive impact on social-media engagement, although some effects were not robust to alternative analysis specifications. The presence of credibility badges led to greater belief in true claims, lower belief in false claims, and improved discrimination. The credibility-badge intervention also had robust positive impacts on social-media engagement, leading to increased flagging and decreased liking and sharing of false posts. Cumulatively, the results suggest that both interventions have potential to combat misinformation and improve the social-media information landscape.
Nudge-based misinformation interventions are presented as cheap and effective ways to reduce the spread of misinformation online. However, despite online information environments typically containing ...relatively low volumes of misinformation, most studies testing the effectiveness of nudge interventions present equal proportions of true and false information. As the effectiveness of nudges can be highly context-dependent, it is imperative to validate the effectiveness of nudge-based interventions in environments with more realistic proportions of misinformation. The current study (N = 1387) assessed the effectiveness of a combined accuracy and social-norm nudge in simulated social-media environments with varying proportions of misinformation (50%, 20%, and 12.5%) relative to true and non-news-based (i.e., "social") information. The nudge intervention was effective at improving sharing discernment in conditions with lower proportions of misinformation, providing ecologically valid support for the use of nudge-based interventions to counter misinformation propagation on social media.
Given the potential negative impact reliance on misinformation can have, substantial effort has gone into understanding the factors that influence misinformation belief and propagation. However, ...despite the rise of social media often being cited as a fundamental driver of misinformation exposure and false beliefs, how people process misinformation on social media platforms has been under-investigated. This is partially due to a lack of adaptable and ecologically valid social media testing paradigms, resulting in an over-reliance on survey software and questionnaire-based measures. To provide researchers with a flexible tool to investigate the processing and sharing of misinformation on social media, this paper presents The Misinformation Game—an easily adaptable, open-source online testing platform that simulates key characteristics of social media. Researchers can customize posts (e.g., headlines, images), source information (e.g., handles, avatars, credibility), and engagement information (e.g., a post’s number of likes and dislikes). The platform allows a range of response options for participants (like, share, dislike, flag) and supports comments. The simulator can also present posts on individual pages or in a scrollable feed, and can provide customized dynamic feedback to participants via changes to their follower count and credibility score, based on how they interact with each post. Notably, no specific programming skills are required to create studies using the simulator. Here, we outline the key features of the simulator and provide a non-technical guide for use by researchers. We also present results from two validation studies. All the source code and instructions are freely available online at
https://misinfogame.com
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People increasingly rely on social‐media platforms to access information; thus, understanding how platform characteristics influence belief in misinformation is important. Recent findings indicate ...perceived social endorsement of information (e.g., number of likes) can influence misinformation belief and correction acceptance. However, how the influence of endorsement may be modulated by concurrent disendorsement information (e.g., dislikes) is unclear. Across two experiments, we assessed the influence of relative endorsement on misinformation belief and correction acceptance. Experiment 1 exposed participants to claims and fact‐checks with a high or low likes‐to‐dislikes ratio. Experiment 2 simplified the relative‐endorsement information into a single value (i.e., a percentage). Results suggest high relative social endorsement of misinformation significantly increases misinformation belief, particularly when the endorsement information is presented as a single value. Conversely, relative endorsement had a negligible impact on correction effectiveness. This suggests perceived relative endorsement may influence belief primarily when other cues of information veracity are unavailable.
The dynamic reshaping of tissues during morphogenesis results from a combination of individual cell behaviors and collective cell rearrangements. However, a comprehensive framework to unambiguously ...measure and link cell behavior to tissue morphogenesis is lacking. Here we introduce such a kinematic framework, bridging cell and tissue behaviors at an intermediate, mesoscopic, level of cell clusters or domains. By measuring domain deformation in terms of the relative motion of cell positions and the evolution of their shapes, we characterized the basic invariant quantities that measure fundamental classes of cell behavior, namely tensorial rates of cell shape change and cell intercalation. In doing so we introduce an explicit definition of cell intercalation as a continuous process. We mapped strain rates spatiotemporally in three models of tissue morphogenesis, gaining insight into morphogenetic mechanisms. Our quantitative approach has broad relevance for the precise characterization and comparison of morphogenetic phenotypes.
Drosophila germ-band extension (GBE) is an example of the convergence and extension movements that elongate and narrow embryonic tissues. To understand the collective cell behaviours underlying ...tissue morphogenesis, we have continuously quantified cell intercalation and cell shape change during GBE. We show that the fast, early phase of GBE depends on cell shape change in addition to cell intercalation. In antero-posterior patterning mutants such as those for the gap gene Krüppel, defective polarized cell intercalation is compensated for by an increase in antero-posterior cell elongation, such that the initial rate of extension remains the same. Spatio-temporal patterns of cell behaviours indicate that an antero-posterior tensile force deforms the germ band, causing the cells to change shape passively. The rate of antero-posterior cell elongation is reduced in twist mutant embryos, which lack mesoderm. We propose that cell shape change contributing to germ-band extension is a passive response to mechanical forces caused by the invaginating mesoderm.
The COVID-19 pandemic has understandably dominated public discourse, crowding out other important issues such as climate change. Currently, if climate change enters the arena of public debate, it ...primarily does so in direct relation to the pandemic. In two experiments, we investigated (1) whether portraying the response to the COVID-19 threat as a “trial run” for future climate action would increase climate-change concern and mitigation support, and (2) whether portraying climate change as a concern that needs to take a “back seat” while focus lies on economic recovery would decrease climate-change concern and mitigation support. We found no support for the effectiveness of a trial-run frame in either experiment. In Experiment 1, we found that a back-seat frame reduced participants’ support for mitigative action. In Experiment 2, the back-seat framing reduced both climate-change concern and mitigation support; a combined inoculation and refutation was able to offset the drop in climate concern but not the reduction in mitigation support.
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•We tested the impact of two distinct COVID-19 climate change frames.•We measured climate-change concern and mitigation support.•We found no support for framing COVID response as a trial run for climate action.•Promoting a focus on the economy rather than the climate reduced mitigation support.
We explore the relationship between low-carbon objectives and the strategic security of electricity in the context of the UK electricity system. We consider diversity of fuel source mix to represent ...one dimension of security—robustness against interruptions of any one source—and apply two different diversity indices to the range of electricity system scenarios produced by the UK government and independent researchers. Our results show that low-carbon objectives are uniformly associated with greater long-term diversity in UK electricity generation. With reference to data on wind generation we also consider the impact of source variability on a second dimension of security—the reliability of generation availability. We conclude that this does not undermine our fundamental conclusion that low-carbon scenarios are associated with greater strategic security of supply in UK electricity. We discuss reasons for this result, explore sensitivities, and briefly discuss possible policy instruments associated with diversity and their limitations.
Reliance on misinformation often persists in the face of corrections. However, the role of social factors on people's reliance on corrected misinformation has received little attention. In two ...experiments, we investigated the extent to which social endorsement of misinformation and corrections influences belief updating. In both experiments misinformation and fact-checks were presented as social media posts, and social endorsement was manipulated via the number of "likes." In Experiment 1, social endorsement of the initial misinformation had a significant influence on belief; participants believed misinformation with high social endorsement more than misinformation with low endorsement. This effect was observed pre-fact-check and post-fact-check. High social endorsement of the fact-checks was associated with reduced misinformation belief; however, evidence for the persistence of this effect was mixed. These findings were replicated in Experiment 2. Our findings indicate that social endorsement can moderate our beliefs in misinformation and the fact-checks designed to correct these beliefs.
General Audience Summary
Misinformation can be created and spread on social media platforms with relative ease. Additionally, unlike traditional media, common cues of information credibility, such as source expertise and trustworthiness, are often unavailable on social media platforms. As such, determining what to believe versus what to disregard can be difficult. To reduce the effort required to assess information credibility, people may rely on mental shortcuts (or heuristics). Specifically, it is well established that people often look to others, or the majority, when making decisions about what to believe and how to behave. As such, people may rely on engagement metrics on social media (e.g., the number of "likes" or "shares" a post has) to gauge information credibility. Across two experiments, we investigated how level of social endorsement (specifically, whether a social media post has a high or low number of "likes") influenced the extent to which people believed misinformation, and updated their belief based on subsequent fact-checks. We found that people had greater belief in misinformation with a high versus low level of likes, even after they received a fact-check. Further, fact-checks with a high number of likes reduced belief in misinformation more than fact-checks with a low number of likes. However, evidence for the persistence of the effect of fact-check endorsement on belief updating was mixed. These findings suggest that people may rely on engagement metrics, specifically number of likes, when appraising misinformation on social media. This influence of endorsement information may be reason for concern, particularly given that engagement information can be maliciously manipulated, and misleading and conspiratorial claims often have characteristics designed to enhance their level of endorsement.
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