David G Rand
Biographic Data
| ID | 1751781 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David G Rand |
| GIVEN NAMES | David G |
| FAMILY NAME | Rand |
| SIGNATURE | RAND D G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2821-468X |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 48 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 607 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 48 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Overconfidently Conspiratorial: Conspiracy Believers are Dispositionally Overconfident and Massively Overestimate How Much Others Agree With Them
There is a pressing need to understand why people believe in conspiracies. Although past work has focused on needs and motivations, we propose an alternative driver of belief: overconfidence. Across eight studies with 4,181 U.S. adults, conspiracy believers consistently overestimated their performance on numeracy and perception tests (even after taking their actual performance into account). This relationship with overconfidence was robust in con…
After the Takeover: Rebuilding Trust in Public Media Through Institutional Reform
Self-persuasion does not imply self-deception
Existing theory argues that the "self-persuasion" effect, whereby individuals who are incentivized to persuade others adjust their own beliefs to align with their persuasion goals, is a consequence of self-deception stemming from the motive to persuade others. Here, we propose an alternative explanation: we argue that self-persuasion may arise through simply being preferentially exposed to goal-aligned arguments. We then provide empirical evidenc…
Fact-checker warning labels are effective even for those who distrust fact-checkers
Thinking more or thinking differently? Using drift-diffusion modeling to illuminate why accuracy prompts decrease misinformation sharing
Recent experiments have found that prompting people to think about accuracy reduces misinformation sharing intentions. The process by which this effect operates, however, remains unclear. Do accuracy prompts cause people to "stop and think," increasing deliberation? Or do they change what people think about, drawing attention to accuracy? Since these two accounts predict the same behavioral outcomes (i.e., increased sharing discernment following …
Emotion may predict susceptibility to fake news but emotion regulation does not seem to help
Misinformation is a serious concern for societies across the globe. To design effective interventions to combat the belief in and spread of misinformation, we must understand which psychological processes influence susceptibility to misinformation. This paper tests the widely assumed - but largely untested - claim that emotionally provocative headlines are associated with worse ability to identify true versus false headlines. Consistent with this…
Beliefs About Covid-19 in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States: A Novel Test of Political Polarization and Motivated Reasoning
What are the psychological consequences of the increasingly politicized nature of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States relative to similar Western countries? In a two-wave study completed early (March) and later (December) in the pandemic, we found that polarization was greater in the United States ( N = 1,339) than in Canada ( N = 644) and the United Kingdom. ( N = 1,283). Political conservatism in the United States was strongly associated…
Learning to be selfish? A large-scale longitudinal analysis of Dictator games played on Amazon Mechanical Turk
Does deliberation decrease belief in conspiracies
Nudging Social Media toward Accuracy
A meaningful portion of online misinformation sharing is likely attributable to Internet users failing to consider accuracy when deciding what to share. As a result, simply redirecting attention to the concept of accuracy can increase sharing discernment. Here we discuss the importance of accuracy and describe a limited-attention utility model that is based on a theory about inattention to accuracy on social media. We review research that shows h…
Interventions reducing affective polarization do not necessarily improve anti-democratic attitudes
Elite party cues increase vaccination intentions among Republicans
Overcoming the COVID-19 pandemic requires motivating the vast majority of Americans to get vaccinated. However, vaccination rates have become politically polarized, and a substantial proportion of Republicans have remained vaccine hesitant for months. Here, we explore how endorsements by party elites affect Republicans’ COVID-19 vaccination intentions and attitudes. In a preregistered survey experiment ( n = 1,480), we varied whether self-identif…
The Psychology of Fake News
We synthesize a burgeoning literature investigating why people believe and share false or highly misleading news online. Contrary to a common narrative whereby politics drives susceptibility to fake news, people are 'better' at discerning truth from falsehood (despite greater overall belief) when evaluating politically concordant news. Instead, poor truth discernment is associated with lack of careful reasoning and relevant knowledge, and the use…
Character deprecation in fake news: Is it in supply or demand
A major focus of current research is understanding why people fall for and share fake news on social media. While much research focuses on understanding the role of personality-level traits for those who share the news, such as partisanship and analytic thinking, characteristics of the articles themselves have not been studied. Across two pre-registered studies, we examined whether character-deprecation headlines - headlines designed to deprecate…
Thinking clearly about causal inferences of politically motivated reasoning: Why paradigmatic study designs often undermine causal inference
Self-reported willingness to share political news articles in online surveys correlates with actual sharing on Twitter
There is an increasing imperative for psychologists and other behavioral scientists to understand how people behave on social media. However, it is often very difficult to execute experimental research on actual social media platforms, or to link survey responses to online behavior in order to perform correlational analyses. Thus, there is a natural desire to use self-reported behavioral intentions in standard survey studies to gain insight into …
Bayesian or biased? Analytic thinking and political belief updating
A surprising finding from U.S. opinion surveys is that political disagreements tend to be greatest among the most cognitively sophisticated opposing partisans. Recent experiments suggest a hypothesis that could explain this pattern: cognitive sophistication magnifies politically biased processing of new information. However, the designs of these experiments tend to contain several limitations that complicate their support for this hypothesis. In …
Turkers of the World Unite: Multilevel In-Group Bias Among Crowdworkers on Amazon Mechanical Turk
Crowdsourcing has become an indispensable tool in the behavioral sciences. Often, the “crowd” is considered a black box for gathering impersonal but generalizable data. Researchers sometimes seem to forget that crowdworkers are people with social contexts, unique personalities, and lives. To test this possibility, we measure how crowdworkers ( N = 2,337, preregistered) share a monetary endowment in a Dictator Game with another Mechanical Turk (MT…
Fighting Covid-19 Misinformation on Social Media: Experimental Evidence for a Scalable Accuracy-Nudge Intervention
Across two studies with more than 1,700 U.S. adults recruited online, we present evidence that people share false claims about COVID-19 partly because they simply fail to think sufficiently about whether or not the content is accurate when deciding what to share. In Study 1, participants were far worse at discerning between true and false content when deciding what they would share on social media relative to when they were asked directly about a…
Who falls for fake news? The roles of bullshit receptivity, overclaiming, familiarity, and analytic thinking
OBJECTIVE: Fake news represents a particularly egregious and direct avenue by which inaccurate beliefs have been propagated via social media. We investigate the psychological profile of individuals who fall prey to fake news. METHOD: We recruited 1,606 participants from Amazon's Mechanical Turk for three online surveys. RESULTS: The tendency to ascribe profundity to randomly generated sentences-pseudo-profound bullshit receptivity-correlates posi…
Are those who believe in God really more prosocial
Whether those who believe in God are more prosocial has been a long debated topic. Here we shed new light on this question by examining giving in incentivized Dictator Games where no mention of religion was made, played online with anonymous strangers. Study 1 (N = 15,827) found a significant correlation between belief and giving, r = .122 (robust to demographics). Study 2 (N = 2334) included the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) to examine whether…
Signaling when no one is watching: A reputation heuristics account of outrage and punishment in one-shot anonymous interactions
on Jul 22 2019 (see record 2019-43753-001). In the article, a printer error did not enable the authors to correct various errors before publication. Tables 1 and 2 have been corrected. All versions of this article have been corrected.] Moralistic punishment can confer reputation benefits by signaling trustworthiness to observers. However, why do people punish even when nobody is watching? We argue that people often rely on the heuristic that repu…
Repetition increases perceived truth equally for plausible and implausible statements
A field experiment on community policing and police legitimacy
Despite decades of declining crime rates, longstanding tensions between police and the public continue to frustrate the formation of cooperative relationships necessary for the function of the police and the provision of public safety. In response, policy makers continue to promote community-oriented policing (COP) and its emphasis on positive, nonenforcement contact with the public as an effective strategy for enhancing public trust and police l…
Belief in fake news is associated with delusionality, dogmatism, religious fundamentalism, and reduced analytic thinking.
Delusion-prone individuals may be more likely to accept even delusion-irrelevant implausible ideas because of their tendency to engage in less analytic and actively open-minded thinking.Consistent with this suggestion, two online studies with over 900 participants demonstrated that although delusion-prone individuals were no more likely to believe true news headlines, they displayed an increased belief in "fake news" headlines, which often featur…
Structural Topic Models for Open‐Ended Survey Responses
Collection and especially analysis of open‐ended survey responses are relatively rare in the discipline and when conducted are almost exclusively done through human coding. We present an alternative, semiautomated approach, the structural topic model (STM) (Roberts, Stewart, and Airoldi 2013; Roberts et al. 2013), that draws on recent developments in machine learning based analysis of textual data. A crucial contribution of the method is that it …
Interventions reducing affective polarization do not necessarily improve anti-democratic attitudes
Signaling when no one is watching: A reputation heuristics account of outrage and punishment in one-shot anonymous interactions
on Jul 22 2019 (see record 2019-43753-001). In the article, a printer error did not enable the authors to correct various errors before publication. Tables 1 and 2 have been corrected. All versions of this article have been corrected.] Moralistic punishment can confer reputation benefits by signaling trustworthiness to observers. However, why do people punish even when nobody is watching? We argue that people often rely on the heuristic that repu…
An uncertainty management perspective on long-run impacts of adversity: The influence of childhood socioeconomic status on risk, time, and social preferences
Non-naïvety may reduce the effect of intuition manipulations
The Emergence of “Us and Them” in 80 Lines of Code: Modeling Group Genesis in Homogeneous Populations
Psychological explanations of group genesis often require population heterogeneity in identity or other characteristics, whether deep (e.g., religion) or superficial (e.g., eye color). We used agent-based models to explore group genesis in homogeneous populations and found robust group formation with just two basic principles: reciprocity and transitivity. These emergent groups demonstrated in-group cooperation and out-group defection, even thoug…
Does deliberation decrease belief in conspiracies
Nudging Social Media toward Accuracy
A meaningful portion of online misinformation sharing is likely attributable to Internet users failing to consider accuracy when deciding what to share. As a result, simply redirecting attention to the concept of accuracy can increase sharing discernment. Here we discuss the importance of accuracy and describe a limited-attention utility model that is based on a theory about inattention to accuracy on social media. We review research that shows h…
Learning to be selfish? A large-scale longitudinal analysis of Dictator games played on Amazon Mechanical Turk
Social Context and the Dynamics of Cooperative Choice
Recent work using decontextualized economic games suggests that cooperation is a dynamic decision‐making process: Automatic responses typically support cooperation on average, while deliberation leads to increased selfishness. Here, we performed two studies examining how these temporal effects generalize to games with richer social context cues. Study 1 found that time pressure increased cooperation to a similar extent in games played with in‐gro…
Fact-checker warning labels are effective even for those who distrust fact-checkers
Social dilemma cooperation (unlike Dictator Game giving) is intuitive for men as well as women
Character deprecation in fake news: Is it in supply or demand
A major focus of current research is understanding why people fall for and share fake news on social media. While much research focuses on understanding the role of personality-level traits for those who share the news, such as partisanship and analytic thinking, characteristics of the articles themselves have not been studied. Across two pre-registered studies, we examined whether character-deprecation headlines - headlines designed to deprecate…
Positive Interactions Promote Public Cooperation
Carrots Are Better Than Sticks The challenge of dealing with freeloaders—who benefit from a common good but refuse to pay their “fair share” of the costs—has often been met in theoretical and laboratory studies by sanctioning costly punishment, in which contributors pay a portion of their benefit so that freeloaders lose theirs. Rand et al. (p. 1272 ; see the news story by Pennisi and the cover) added a private interaction session after each roun…
Currency value moderates equity preference among young children
The online laboratory: Conducting experiments in a real labor market
Online labor markets have great potential as platforms for conducting experiments. They provide immediate access to a large and diverse subject pool, and allow researchers to control the experimental context. Online experiments, we show, can be just as valid—both internally and externally—as laboratory and field experiments, while often requiring far less money and time to design and conduct. To demonstrate their value, we use an online labor mar…
Spontaneous giving and calculated greed
The promise of Mechanical Turk: How online labor markets can help theorists run behavioral experiments
Human cooperation
Cooperating with the future
Reaction times and reflection in social dilemmas: Extreme responses are fast, but not intuitive
Religious motivations for cooperation: An experimental investigation using explicit primes
The role of religion in human cooperation remains a highly contested topic. Recent studies using economic game experiments to explore this issue have been largely inconclusive, yielding a range of conflicting results. In this study, we investigate the ability of religion to promote cooperation by using explicit theological primes. In the first study, conducted in a church, we find that subjects who report a stronger connection with a Christian pa…
Social Context and the Dynamics of Cooperative Choice
Recent work using decontextualized economic games suggests that cooperation is a dynamic decision‐making process: Automatic responses typically support cooperation on average, while deliberation leads to increased selfishness. Here, we performed two studies examining how these temporal effects generalize to games with richer social context cues. Study 1 found that time pressure increased cooperation to a similar extent in games played with in‐gro…
The Emergence of “Us and Them” in 80 Lines of Code: Modeling Group Genesis in Homogeneous Populations
Psychological explanations of group genesis often require population heterogeneity in identity or other characteristics, whether deep (e.g., religion) or superficial (e.g., eye color). We used agent-based models to explore group genesis in homogeneous populations and found robust group formation with just two basic principles: reciprocity and transitivity. These emergent groups demonstrated in-group cooperation and out-group defection, even thoug…
Structural Topic Models for Open‐Ended Survey Responses
Collection and especially analysis of open‐ended survey responses are relatively rare in the discipline and when conducted are almost exclusively done through human coding. We present an alternative, semiautomated approach, the structural topic model (STM) (Roberts, Stewart, and Airoldi 2013; Roberts et al. 2013), that draws on recent developments in machine learning based analysis of textual data. A crucial contribution of the method is that it …
Inequality and visibility of wealth in experimental social networks
Cooperation, Fast and Slow: Meta-Analytic Evidence for a Theory of Social Heuristics and Self-Interested Deliberation
Does cooperating require the inhibition of selfish urges? Or does “rational” self-interest constrain cooperative impulses? I investigated the role of intuition and deliberation in cooperation by meta-analyzing 67 studies in which cognitive-processing manipulations were applied to economic cooperation games (total N = 17,647; no indication of publication bias using Egger’s test, Begg’s test, or p-curve). My meta-analysis was guided by the social h…
How Good Is the Samaritan, and Why: An Experimental Investigation of the Extent and Nature of Religious Prosociality Using Economic Games
What is the extent and nature of religious prosociality? If religious prosociality exists, is it parochial and extended selectively to coreligionists or is it generalized regardless of the recipient? Further, is it driven by preferences to help others or by expectations of reciprocity? We examined how much of a US$0.30 bonus Mechanical Turk workers would share with the other player whose religion was prominently displayed during two online resour…
No unique effect of intergroup competition on cooperation: Non-competitive thresholds are as effective as competitions between groups for increasing human cooperative behavior
Why Do We Hate Hypocrites? Evidence for a Theory of False Signaling
Why do people judge hypocrites, who condemn immoral behaviors that they in fact engage in, so negatively? We propose that hypocrites are disliked because their condemnation sends a false signal about their personal conduct, deceptively suggesting that they behave morally. We show that verbal condemnation signals moral goodness (Study 1) and does so even more convincingly than directly stating that one behaves morally (Study 2). We then demonstrat…
Social dilemma cooperation (unlike Dictator Game giving) is intuitive for men as well as women
Evolution: The value of information
Profit Versus Prejudice: Harnessing Self-Interest to Reduce In-Group Bias
We examine the possibility that self-interest, typically thought to undermine social welfare, might reduce in-group bias. We compared the dictator game (DG), where participants unilaterally divide money between themselves and a recipient, and the ultimatum game (UG), where the recipient can reject these offers. Unlike the DG, there is a self-interested motive for UG giving: If participants expect the rejection of unfair offers, they have a moneta…
Lazy, not biased: Susceptibility to partisan fake news is better explained by lack of reasoning than by motivated reasoning
An uncertainty management perspective on long-run impacts of adversity: The influence of childhood socioeconomic status on risk, time, and social preferences
Non-naïvety may reduce the effect of intuition manipulations
Repetition increases perceived truth equally for plausible and implausible statements
A field experiment on community policing and police legitimacy
Despite decades of declining crime rates, longstanding tensions between police and the public continue to frustrate the formation of cooperative relationships necessary for the function of the police and the provision of public safety. In response, policy makers continue to promote community-oriented policing (COP) and its emphasis on positive, nonenforcement contact with the public as an effective strategy for enhancing public trust and police l…
Psychology (42 works) · Social Psychology (38 works) · Political science (22 works) · Computer Science (21 works) · Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies (20 works) · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation (18 works) · Misinformation and Its Impacts (16 works) · Economics (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (14 works)