Jacopo Marchetti

In current behavioral debate, fake news is often treated as a static entity—finite in nature, potentially subject to fact-checking, and lacking evolutionary characteristics. We aim to bridge existing domains of behavioral research on fake news by introducing an evolutionary model based on three fundamental mechanisms: variation (what users generate), selection (what users pay attention to), and retention (what users share). This model accounts for the dynamic transformation of non-fake content into fake news, and vice versa.

Institutions represent a solid basis to organize and stabilize human life in diferent social contexts. They are external events in the world, but they also have a strong anchorage in the mind and in last years many scholars tried to explore their cognitive ground. Starting from the original attempt of Douglass C. North, who at the end of his career tried to establish a program called “Cognitive Institutionalism”, we discuss the merits and the limits of this approach. First, we show that his statements are cognitively onerous as they imply the notions of mental models and beliefs. Instead, we argue that shared institutions do not require such a convergence and that coordination takes place in the form of social practices and habits. Second, we clarify some aspects of North’s cognitive theory avoiding the ontological reading, i.e. explaining in what sense institutions might depend on the human mind and how people are joined into a practice made possible via institutions.