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Public opinion polls have shown that beliefs about climate change have become increasingly polarized in the United States. A popular contemporary form of communication relevant to beliefs about climate change involves digital artifacts known as memes. The present study investigated whether memes can influence the assessment of scientific data about climate change, and whether their impact differs between political liberals and conservatives in the United States. In Study 1, we considered three hypotheses about the potential impact of memes on strongly-held politicized beliefs: 1) memes fundamentally serve social functions, and do not actually impact cognitive assessments of objective information; 2) politically incongruent memes will have a “backfire” effect; and 3) memes can indeed change assessments of scientific data about climate change, even for people with strong entering beliefs. We found evidence in support of the hypothesis that memes have the potential to change assessments of scientific information about climate change. Study 2 explored whether different partisan pages that post climate change memes elicit different emotions from their audiences, as well as how climate change is discussed in different ways by those at opposite ends of the political spectrum. 

The QAnon conspiracy posits that Satan-worshiping Democrats operate a covert child sex-trafficking operation, which Donald Trump is destined to expose and annihilate. Emblematic of the ease with which political misconceptions can spread through social media, QAnon originated in late 2017 and rapidly grew to shape the political beliefs of millions. To illuminate the process by which a conspiracy theory spreads, we report two computational studies examining the social network structure and semantic content of tweets produced by users central to the early QAnon network on Twitter. Using data mined in the summer of 2018, we examined over 800,000 tweets about QAnon made by about 100,000 users. The majority of users disseminated rather than produced information, serving to create an online echochamber. Users appeared to hold a simplistic mental model in which political events are viewed as a struggle between antithetical forces—both observed and unobserved—of Good and Evil. 

Competence and morality are two of the most important dimensions in social evaluation. Recent studies have suggested the primacy of morality, showing that information about immorality of an ordinary target person decreases evaluation of their competence. We examined the effect of moral taint on multiple non-moral judgments: ratings of the competence, accomplishment, and contribution of fictitious professionals who were described as highly successful in various fields. Moral taint significantly decreased participants’ non-moral social evaluations of professionals regardless of their field. Mediation analyses showed that the negative impact of immoral character on competence judgments is more strongly mediated by the decrease in participants’ psychological involvement with the target, rather than a decrease in perceived social intelligence of the target. These findings suggest that motivation to distance oneself from immoral others plays a critical role in the revision of social evaluations.