UC Santa Barbara

Does aligning misinformation content with individuals' core moral values facilitate its spread? We investigate this question in three behavioral experiments (N_1a = 615; N_1b = 505; N₂ = 533) that examine how the alignment of audience values and misinformation framing affects sharing behavior, in conjunction with analyzing real-world Twitter data (N = 20,235; 809,414 tweets) that explores how aligning the moral values of message senders with misinformation content influences its dissemination in the context of COVID-19 vaccination misinformation. First, we investigate how aligning messages' moral framing with participants' moral values impacts participants' intentions to share true and false news headlines and whether this effect is driven by a lack of analytical thinking. Our results show that framing a post such that it aligns with audiences' moral values leads to increased sharing intentions, independent of headline familiarity, and participants' political ideology but find no effect of analytical thinking. Furthermore, we find that moral alignment facilitates sharing misinformation more so than true information. Next, we use natural language processing to determine messages' moral framing and senders' political ideology. We find that an alignment of moral framing and ideology facilitates the spread of misinformation. Our findings suggest that (a) targeting audiences' core values can be used to influence the dissemination of (mis)information on social media platforms; (b) partisan divides in misinformation sharing can be, at least partially, explained through alignment between audiences' underlying moral values and moral framing that often accompanies content shared online; and (c) this effect is driven by motivational factors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).