conscientiousness
Definition
Conscientiousness is a personality trait characterized by orderliness and impulse control, which shapes individuals' likelihood of sharing false information online. In a large-scale re-analysis of 12 studies totaling 6,790 participants and 143,956 observations, conscientiousness emerged as a negative but highly heterogeneous predictor of fake news sharing, with meta-analytic correlations of r = .22 across one set of datasets and r = .08 across another. The trait also functions as a moderator: across 35 analytical specifications, 21 models showed that conscientiousness significantly attenuated the positive relationship between right-wing political ideology and the tendency to share misinformation, particularly when ideology was operationalized as warmth toward Republicans. Whether this moderation is detected depends heavily on methodological choices such as the ideology measure used, the analytical approach adopted, and the specific news stimuli included in a study.
Sources: Lawson & Kakkar (2024)
Related Terms
- misinformation (1 shared article)
- interventions (1 shared article)
- fake news (1 shared article)
- metascience (1 shared article)
Applications
Conscientiousness and Fake News Sharing
Higher conscientiousness is associated with reduced sharing of fake news, but the size of this effect varies substantially across study contexts, as reflected in heterogeneity statistics of I² = 99.1% and I² = 95.8% across two sets of re-analyzed datasets. Individuals classified as Low Conscientiousness Conservatives accounted for 34.9% of all fake news shares in one set of samples despite constituting only 16.8% of the population, and simulations suggest that shifting this group's behavior could reduce the proportion of fake stories circulating by approximately 33%.
Sources: Lawson & Kakkar (2024)
Conscientiousness and Political Ideology
Conscientiousness moderates the relationship between political ideology and fake news sharing rather than predicting sharing independently of ideology. This moderation is an attenuation effect: higher conscientiousness suppresses the positive association between right-wing ideology and sharing, and it is observable only when the ideology measure itself correlates positively with sharing behavior. The majority of ideology measures used in one set of re-analyzed studies failed that condition, which explains why divergent conclusions about the moderation were reached from overlapping data.
Sources: Lawson & Kakkar (2024)
