Moral deliberation reduces people's intentions to share headlines they recognize as "fake news"

Ranked among the most serious global threats, misinformation spreads in part because people share it on social media. Based on theories that people usually share misinformation unintentionally, interventions typically aim to curb misinformation's spread by helping people distinguish fact from falsehood. However, people sometimes intentionally spread misinformation despite recognizing its falsity. Understanding and curbing this type of sharing requires new theory and tools. Leveraging insights from moral psychology, the present research examines whether people will be more reluctant to share misinformation when they think carefully about its moral implications. Engaging in such moral deliberation, we theorize, leads people to judge misinformation as more unethical to share, which inhibits them from forming intentions to share it. Five experiments (four preregistered, N = 2,509 U.S. and U.K. social media users, including a demographically representative U.S. sample) tested a moral-deliberation procedure in which participants list reasons why it would be ethical or unethical to share different news headlines on social media. This procedure-relative to control conditions that prompted nonmoral deliberation, prompted nondeliberative thinking about morality, or included no prompt-reduced intentions to share fake news about business, health, and politics, even when the news was flagged as false. These effects were (a) larger when the fake news aligned with participants' politics, (b) reversed for real news, (c) still observed after a delay, and (d) mediated by moral judgments. Our results offer a theoretical foundation for new tools to fight society's "infodemic" of misinformation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).