Advances in Psychology | December 2024
do accuracy prompts work equally well for liberals and conservatives? Do certain aspects
of personality, such as conscientiousness, affect fake news sharing? In the present research,
we focus on the causes of these debates and how to resolve them. Moreover, we
contribute to the specific debate regarding the role of conscientiousness in sharing fake
news by re-analyzing 12 studies containing a total of 6,790 participants and 143,956 observations.
We highlight how researchers’ methodological choices can lead to different conclusions.
We find that conscientiousness moderates the positive effect of some, but not all,
measures of ideology when predicting fake news sharing. This investigation reveals the importance
of factors such as ideology measure, analytical approach, and choice of news stimuli
in arriving at different conclusions. We thus propose a framework for identifying and mitigating
the role of these factors to stimulate faster convergence in misinformation research.
Finally, we demonstrate that a variable does not need to interact with news veracity to be
important for understanding the proliferation of fake news. In doing so, this work offers a
novel perspective on conceptualizing possible interventions in misinformation research.
Hemant Kakkar is an Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at the Indian School of Business (ISB). Prior to this, he served as an Assistant and Associate (untenured) Professor of Management and Organisations at the Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. He received his doctoral degree in Organisational Behaviour from London Business School.
His research draws on social psychology and evolutionary theories of status and influence to examine judgments and behaviours of individuals and groups within social hierarchies. He also examines individuals' tendencies to engage in both positive and negative deviant behaviours.
He was awarded the 2021 Alvah H. Chapman Jr. Outstanding Dissertation Award, as well as, the Outstanding Dissertation Award 2021 by the International Association of Conflict Management. His research has also won Best Conference Paper awards from the Conflict Management Division of the Academy of Management (2021) and the International Association of Conflict Management (2021).
His research is published in leading academic journals, including the Academy of Management Journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Applied Psychology, Nature Human Behaviour, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, and Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. His research has also been featured in several popular media outlets, such as The Washington Post, Forbes, The Atlantic, Scientific American, The Times UK, and the Harvard Business Review.
At ISB, Professor Kakkar teaches the core course in Organisational Behaviour. He has also taught Foundations of Organisational Behaviour to postgraduate students and graduate-level seminar courses at the Fuqua School of Business. In 2021, he received the Award for Excellence in Teaching for the MMS program. Before joining academia, he worked as a Technical Consultant at Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., India.
