In recent years, there has been a great deal of concern about the proliferation of false and misleading news on social media^1,2,3,4. Academics and practitioners alike have asked why people share such misinformation, and sought solutions to reduce the sharing of misinformation^5,6,7. Here, we attempt to address both of these questions. First, we find that the veracity of headlines has little effect on sharing intentions, despite having a large effect on judgments of accuracy. This dissociation suggests that sharing does not necessarily indicate belief. Nonetheless, most participants say it is important to share only accurate news. To shed light on this apparent contradiction, we carried out four survey experiments and a field experiment on Twitter; the results show that subtly shifting attention to accuracy increases the quality of news that people subsequently share. Together with additional computational analyses, these findings indicate that people often share misinformation because their attention is focused on factors other than accuracy—and therefore they fail to implement a strongly held preference for accurate sharing. Our results challenge the popular claim that people value partisanship over accuracy^8,9, and provide evidence for scalable attention-based interventions that social media platforms could easily implement to counter misinformation online.

近年来，社交媒体上虚假和误导性新闻的泛滥引起了极大关注^1,2,3,4。学者和从业者都曾询问人们为何分享此类错误信息，并寻求解决方案以减少错误信息的分享^5,6,7. 在这里，我们试图解决这两个问题。首先，我们发现标题的真实性对分享意图几乎没有影响，尽管对准确性的判断有很大影响。这种分离表明分享并不一定表明信仰。尽管如此，大多数参与者表示只分享准确的新闻很重要。为了阐明这个明显的矛盾，我们在 Twitter 上进行了四次调查实验和一次实地实验；结果表明，将注意力巧妙地转移到准确性上会提高人们随后分享的新闻质量。连同额外的计算分析，这些发现表明，人们经常分享错误信息，因为他们的注意力集中在准确性以外的因素上——因此他们未能实现对准确分享的强烈偏好。我们的结果挑战了人们重视党派偏见而不是准确性的流行说法^8,9，并为可扩展的基于注意力的干预措施提供证据，社交媒体平台可以轻松实施这些干预措施，以应对在线错误信息。