Information often spreads and influences beliefs regardless of its reliability. We show that this occurs in part because indicators of reliability tend to be lost in the process of word-of-mouth transmission. We conduct controlled experiments where participants listen to economic forecasts and pass them on through voice messages. Other participants listen either to original or transmitted audio recordings and report incentivized beliefs. Across various transmitter incentive schemes, a claim’s reliability is lost in transmission much more than the claim itself. Reliable and unreliable information, once filtered through transmission, impact listener beliefs similarly. Mechanism experiments show that reliability is lost not because it is perceived as less relevant or harder to transmit, but because it is less likely to come to mind during transmission. Evidence from our experiments, a large corpus of everyday conversations, and economic TV news shows that contextual cues can bring reliability to mind and induce its transmission, but situations in which people share information seldom contain such cues.

Standard labor market models assume that workers hold accurate beliefs about the external wage distribution, and hence their outside options with other employers. We test this assumption by comparing German workers’ beliefs about outside options with objective benchmarks. First, we find that workers wrongly anchor their beliefs about outside options on their current wage: workers that would experience a 10% wage change if switching to their outside option only expect a 1% change. Second, workers in low-paying firms underestimate wages elsewhere. Third, in response to information about the wages of similar workers, respondents correct their beliefs about their outside options and change their job search and wage negotiation intentions. Finally, we analyze the consequences of anchoring in a simple equilibrium model. In the model, anchored beliefs keep overly pessimistic workers stuck in low-wage jobs, which gives rise to monopsony power and labor market segmentation.

For many decisions, we encounter relevant information over the course of days, months, or years. We consume such information in various forms, including stories (qualitative content about individual instances) and statistics (quantitative data about collections of observations). This article proposes that information type—story versus statistic—shapes selective memory. In controlled experiments, we document a pronounced story-statistic gap in memory: the average impact of statistics on beliefs fades by 73% over the course of a day, but the impact of a story fades by only 32%. Guided by a model of selective memory, we disentangle different mechanisms and document that similarity relationships drive this gap. Recall of a story increases when its qualitative content is more similar to a memory prompt. Irrelevant information in memory that is similar to the prompt, on the other hand, competes for retrieval with relevant information, impeding successful recall.

Dissent plays an important role in any society, but dissenters are often silenced through social sanctions. Beyond their persuasive effects, rationales providing arguments supporting dissenters’ causes can increase the public expression of dissent by providing a “social cover” for voicing otherwise stigmatized positions. Motivated by a simple theoretical framework, we experimentally show that liberals are more willing to post a tweet opposing the movement to defund the police, are seen as less prejudiced, and face lower social sanctions when their tweet implies they had first read credible scientific evidence supporting their position. Analogous experiments with conservatives demonstrate that the same mechanisms facilitate anti-immigrant expression. Our findings highlight both the power of rationales and their limitations in enabling dissent and shed light on phenomena such as social movements, political correctness, propaganda, and antiminority behavior.