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There is a reason countless songs about loneliness exist. Many are relatable, since feeling alone is often part of being human. But a particular song or experience that resonates with one lonely person may mean nothing to someone else who feels isolated and misunderstood.

Human beings are social creatures. Those who feel left out often experience loneliness. To investigate what goes on in the brains of lonely people, a team of researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, conducted noninvasive brain scans on subjects and found something surprising. The scans revealed that non-lonely individuals were all found to have a similar way of processing the world around them. Lonely people not only interpret things differently from their non-lonely peers, but they even see them differently from each other.

“Our results suggest that lonely people process the world idiosyncratically, which may contribute to the reduced sense of being understood that often accompanies loneliness,” the research team, led by psychologist Elisa Baek, said in a study recently published in Psychological Science. 

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Piecing together why so many people are willing to share misinformation online is a major focus among behavioral scientists. It's easy to think partisanship is driving it all—people will simply share things that make their side look good or their opponents look bad. But the reality is a bit more complicated. Studies have indicated that many people don't seem to carefully evaluate links for accuracy, and that partisanship may be secondary to the rush of getting a lot of likes on social media. Given that, it's not clear what induces users to stop sharing things that a small bit of checking would show to be untrue.

So, a team of researchers tried the obvious: We'll give you money if you stop and evaluate a story's accuracy. The work shows that small payments and even minimal rewards boost the accuracy of people's evaluation of stories. Nearly all that effect comes from people recognizing stories that don't favor their political stance as factually accurate. While the cash boosted the accuracy of conservatives more, they were so far behind liberals in judging accuracy that the gap remains substantial.

Money for accuracy

The basic outline of the new experiments is pretty simple: get a bunch of people, ask them about their political leanings, and then show them a bunch of headlines as they would appear on a social media site such as Facebook. The headlines were rated based on their accuracy (i.e., whether they were true or misinformation) and whether they would be more favorable to liberals or conservatives.

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It's pretty easy to link humans' intelligence to our success as a species. Things like agriculture, building cities, and surviving in harsh environments require a large collection of mental skills, from good memory to the ability to communicate and work together. But it's often less clear what role intelligence plays in species with less obvious mental capabilities. In many cases, it's hard to even measure mental capacities; in other cases, it's hard to guess which capacities might improve survival.

A new study looks at a bird species that doesn't have much of a reputation for braininess: the pheasant. But the researchers behind the study find that pheasants have substantial differences in spatial thinking, and some aspects of that spatial capacity make a difference when the birds are released into the wild. Those birds that do well with navigating a complex maze adopted a larger home territory and did better at avoiding being eaten. And, almost as an accident, the study finds that the birds tend to get eaten more often when they wander out of familiar territory.

Can’t outfox the foxes

Parrots and corvids have reputations as the brainiacs of the bird world. Pheasants, not so much. But they do have advantages for the study of mental abilities. They're easy to raise in captivity, where they can be given various tests, and will adjust easily if released into the wild. They're also big enough that it's easy to attach tracking devices to see what they're doing after they've been released.

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It's fair to say that, once the pandemic started, sharing misinformation on social media took on an added, potentially fatal edge. Inaccurate information about the risks posed by the virus, the efficacy of masks, and the safety of vaccines put people at risk of preventable death. Yet despite the dangers of misinformation, it continues to run rampant on many social media sites, with moderation and policy often struggling to keep up.

If we're going to take any measures to address this—something it's not clear that social media services are interested in doing—then we have to understand why sharing misinformation is so appealing to people. An earlier study had indicated that people care about making sure that what they share is accurate, but they fail to check in many cases. A new study elaborates that by getting into why this disconnect develops: For many users, clicking "share" becomes a habit, something they pursue without any real thought.

How vices become habits

People find plenty of reasons to post misinformation that have nothing to do with whether they mistakenly believe the information is accurate. The misinformation could make their opponents, political or otherwise, look bad. Alternately, it could signal to their allies that they're on the same side or part of the same cultural group. But the initial experiments described here suggest that this sort of biased sharing doesn't explain a significant amount of information.