People often know that sharing fake news is wrong.

Giving explicit reasons about why sharing fake news is ethical or unethical decreases intentions to share.

Just thinking about whether sharing fake news is ethical does not have this impact.

Deliberating about the ethics of sharing affects intention to share fake news, but not true stories.

The costs and benefits of social media have been well-documented. These platforms enable people to connect with others across the world and to stay in contact with friends, family, and colleagues; however, social media also allows people to surround themselves with stories that reinforce their biases and to be bombarded with fake news.

One significant source of fake news is when people encounter and share stories that promote a particular viewpoint despite dubious claims. Because many of the false stories people view were shared by people they know, there is value in research that explores how to prevent false stories from being passed on.

Research explores topics like the factors people use to determine whether a particular story is true, with the hope that people will be less likely to share a story if they know it is false than when they believe it to be true. But people may share stories, even when they know them to be untrue. They may hope to prove a point, or they may pass the story along with comments expressing disapproval.

What can be done to stem the tide of fake stories passed along by people who are already aware they are not true?

This question was explored in a paper published in 2026 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General by Daniel Effron, Judy Qiu, and Deborah Shulman.

These authors proposed that people believe that sharing stories containing fake news is wrong, even when they do it. By this logic, getting people to think explicitly about the moral issues associated with sharing stories on social media can decrease people’s tendency to share fake news.

In one study done in the UK, participants were shown headlines about companies or corporate employees performing bad actions that they were told were fake. They were asked to rate their willingness to share these stories on social media. Most participants were unwilling to share fake stories. Prior to rating their willingness to share, one group was asked to write about why sharing the story was ethical or unethical. A control group wrote about why sharing the story would be interesting or boring. All participants were generally unwilling to share stories they knew to be false, but the ratings for the group that deliberated about the ethics of sharing the stories gave significantly lower ratings of their willingness to share than the control group.

A study done in the United States added to this finding. Participants in this study identified themselves as Democrats or Republicans. Then, they saw stories they were told were false and were asked to rate their willingness to share them on social media. Some of the fake news stories were consistent with their political beliefs, while others were not. Again, before making this rating, participants did another task. Some participants gave reasons why sharing the stories would be ethical or unethical. Others rated how ethical it would be to share the stories, but did not give explicit reasons. A third (control) group did neither of these things. The participants who gave reasons rated themselves as significantly less likely to share fake news stories than did those who just made ratings of the ethics of sharing stories or the control group. The effect was largest for stories that agreed with a participant’s political leanings. That is, it had the biggest impact on the fake stories you might expect a person to be most likely to share.

Other studies in this paper obtained similar findings. One interesting extension of the findings is that one study used some false stories and others that were true. Writing reasons about the ethics of sharing stories decreased the likelihood of sharing fake stories, but had no impact on the likelihood of sharing true stories.

These findings suggest that people know that sharing fake stories is wrong. Forcing people to contemplate why it is wrong helps people to match their intentions to act with their ethical judgments. It also suggests that if you’re tempted to do something that you know is wrong, it can be helpful to think explicitly about why doing it would be wrong rather than just acknowledging the feeling and moving on.

Effron, D. A., Qiu, J., & Shulman, D. (2026). Moral deliberation reduces people’s intentions to share headlines they recognize as “fake news”.Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 155(3), 603–628. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001887

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