Conscientiousness does not moderate the association between political ideology and susceptibility to fake news sharing.

Recent work suggests that personality moderates the relationship between political ideology and the sharing of misinformation. Specifically, Lawson and Kakkar (2022) claimed that fake news sharing was driven mostly by low conscientiousness conservatives. We reanalyzed their data and conducted five new preregistered conceptual replications to reexamine their claims (N = 2,433; stopping rule determined via Bayesian sequential sampling). The results did not support their claim that conscientious conservatives shared less fake news; instead, their findings pertain to overall sharing rates (of both true and fake news), rather than specifically to fake news. That is, the association between conscientiousness and misinformation sharing (when it occurs) is explained by lower overall sharing instead of a particular resistance to fake news per se. Our results highlight the importance of distinguishing between overall sharing tendencies and the sharing of misinformation specifically, which have different theoretical and practical implications for how to combat the spread of misinformation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).