# How many others have shared this? Experimentally investigating the effects of social cues on engagement, misinformation, and unpredictability on social media - Author(s): Ziv Epstein, Hause Lin, Gordon Pennycook, David G. Rand - Date: 2022 - Publication: Arxiv - [Link](https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2207.07562) --- ### Summary Conducted an experiment with N=628 Americans on a custom-built newsfeed interface where they systematically varied the presence and strength of social cues. Find that when cues indicate a larger number of others have engaged with a post, users were more likely to share and like that post. **Relative to a control without social cues, the presence of social cues increased the sharing of true relative to false news.** The presence of social cues also makes it more difficult to precisely predict how popular any given post would be. Their results suggest that – instead of distracting users or causing them to share low-quality news – **social cues may, *in certain circumstances*, actually boost truth discernment and reduce the sharing of misinformation**. --- #### Related [[misinformation]] [[misinfo_interventions]]