How does information transmission change when it requires attracting the attention of receivers? This paper combines an experiment that varies freelance professionals’ incentives to attract attention about scientific findings, with several online experiments that exogenously expose receivers to the content created. Attention incentives lead to significantly less information being transmitted, but not more factually inaccurate content. These incentives increase information demand and the knowledge of interested receivers. However, among the majority of receivers who do not demand more information, attention incentives lower knowledge and increase biases in beliefs, revealing that missing information can be a channel through which misperceptions arise.

Moral behavior is more prevalent when individuals cannot easily distort their beliefs self-servingly. Do individuals seek to limit or enable their ability to distort beliefs? How do these choices affect behavior? Experiments with over 9,000 participants show preferences are heterogeneous—30 percent of participants prefer to limit belief distortion, while over 40 percent prefer to enable it, even if costly. A random assignment mechanism reveals that being assigned to the preferred environment is necessary for curbing or enabling self-serving behavior. Third parties can anticipate these effects, suggesting some sophistication about the cognitive constraints to belief distortion.

Mistakes and overconfidence in detecting lies could help lies spread. Participants in our experiments observe videos in which senders either tell the truth or lie, and are incentivized to distinguish between them. We find that participants fail to detect lies, but are overconfident about their ability to do so. We use these findings to study the determinants of sharing and its effect on lie detection, finding that even when incentivized to share truthful videos, participants are more likely to share lies. Moreover, the receivers are more likely to believe shared videos. Combined, the tendency to believe lies increases with sharing.

Many initiatives worldwide aim at improving financial literacy through targeted education programs, yet there is little evidence regarding their effectiveness. We examine the impact of a short financial education program on teenagers in German high schools. Our findings reveal that the training program significantly increases teenagers’ interest in financial matters and their financial knowledge, especially their ability to properly assess the riskiness of assets. Behaviorally, we observe a decrease in the prevalence of self-reported impulse purchases, but at the same time find no evidence of a significant increase in savings.