Plausible deniability: People often attribute rumours to an individual in a knowledgeable position two steps removed from them (a credible friend of a friend)

It happened to a friend of a friend: inaccurate source reporting in rumour diffusion. Sacha Altay, Nicolas Claidière and Hugo Mercier. Evolutionary Human Sciences, 22020, e49, November 2020. https://doi.org/10.1017/ehs.2020.53

Rolf Degen's take: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1326929913572683777

Abstract: People often attribute rumours to an individual in a knowledgeable position two steps removed from them (a credible friend of a friend), such as ‘my friend's father, who's a cop, told me about a serial killer in town’. Little is known about the influence of such attributions on rumour propagation, or how they are maintained when the rumour is transmitted. In four studies (N = 1824) participants exposed to a rumour and asked to transmit it overwhelmingly attributed it either to a credible friend of a friend, or to a generic friend (e.g. ‘a friend told me about a serial killer in town’). In both cases, participants engaged in source shortening: e.g. when told by a friend that ‘a friend told me …’ they shared the rumour as coming from ‘a friend’ instead of ‘a friend of friend’. Source shortening and reliance on credible sources boosted rumour propagation by increasing the rumours’ perceived plausibility and participants’ willingness to share them. Models show that, in linear transmission chains, the generic friend attribution dominates, but that allowing each individual to be exposed to the rumour from several sources enables the maintenance of the credible friend of a friend attribution.

Check also Altay, Sacha, Anne-Sophie Hacquin, and Hugo Mercier. 2019. “Why Do so Few People Share Fake News? It Hurts Their Reputation.” PsyArXiv. October 1. https://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2020/04/why-do-so-few-people-share-fake-news-it.html

The evolution of mate choice: A key mechanism may be the sense of beauty—the feeling whose function it is to reward attention to, and engagement with, attractive objects

Back to the Basics of Mate Choice: The Evolutionary Importance of Darwin’s Sense of Beauty. Rafael Lucas Rodríguez. The Quarterly Review of Biology, Volume 95, Number 4, Dec 2020. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/711781

Abstract: There is a simple and general explanation for the evolution of mate choice that does not rely on benefits to be gained from favoring some potential mates over others, nor on ornament-preference genetic correlations (but that can help establish such benefits and correlations). Mate choice necessarily arises from competition to engage the powerful but discriminating reward mechanisms that regulate sexual interactions. Progress in understanding the evolution of mate choice will come from analyzing the subjective nature of the cognitive-emotional mechanisms that regulate its expression. A key mechanism may be the sense of beauty—the feeling whose function it is to reward attention to, and engagement with, attractive objects. Any animal whose behavior and decision-making are regulated by mechanisms of emotion and feeling may possess the sense of beauty. Competition to be perceived as beautiful engages brain-generated, top-down influences on perception and subjective experience, adding manifold ways to improve ornament attractiveness. In this paper, I discuss the evolutionary consequences of mate choice involving the sense of beauty and how to test for it.