We have witnessed an alarming deterioration of truth in democracies around the globe, especially in the political arena. This paper describes a proposed intervention, the Pro-Truth Pledge (PTP), which combines behavioral science research with crowd-sourcing to help address this problem. The PTP asks signers – private citizens and public figures – to commit to 12 behaviors that have been shown to be correlated with an orientation toward truthfulness. Pledge mechanisms have been shown in other contexts to lead private citizens to engage in more pro-social behavior. For public figures, the PTP offers specific incentives to behave in concordance with the Pledge, with rewards in the form of positive reputation for honesty and truth-telling, and accountability through crowd-sourced evaluation and potential aversive consequences contingent upon deception. A study conducted on the PTP has demonstrated its effectiveness in reducing the sharing of misinformation on social media. These preliminary findings suggest that the PTP may be an effective intervention for addressing at least some of the problems caused by fake news and post-truth politics.

中文翻译：

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用行为科学打击假新闻和后真相政治：亲真相承诺

我们目睹了全球民主国家中真相的惊人恶化，尤其是在政治领域。本文描述了一项提议的干预措施，即亲真相承诺 (PTP)，它将行为科学研究与众包相结合，以帮助解决这个问题。PTP 要求签名者——私人公民和公众人物——承诺 12 种已被证明与诚实倾向相关的行为。在其他情况下，承诺机制已被证明可以引导私人公民参与更亲社会的行为。对于公众人物，PTP 提供特定的激励措施，让他们按照承诺行事，以诚实和讲真话的正面声誉的形式奖励，并通过众包评估和潜在的因欺骗而定的厌恶后果的问责制。对 PTP 进行的一项研究证明了其在减少社交媒体上错误信息共享方面的有效性。这些初步调查结果表明，PTP 可能是一种有效的干预措施，至少可以解决一些由假新闻和后真相政治引起的问题。