SAGE Publishing makes investment into truthfulness and science with Pro-Truth Pledge

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Nov. 1, 2018 - PRLog -- SAGE Publishing (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/home) - a global independent publisher of journals, books, and library products for the educational, scholarly, and professional markets - announces a grant to support the Pro-Truth Pledge (https://protruthpledge.org), a project dedicated to promoting truthful behavior and fighting misinformation through combining behavioral science with crowdsourcing.

The pledge has already made a notable public impact, with a series of public figures (https://www.protruthpledge.org/public-figures-signed-pledge/), including high-profile ones such as members of US Congress and state legislatures as well as prominent organizations and globally-known intellectuals taking the plunge. Moreover, research showing the effectiveness of the pledge in changing people's behaviors to be more truthful has already been published in peer-reviewed academic journals, such as Behavior and Social Science and the Journal of Social and Political Psychology (https://jspp.psychopen.eu/article/view/856/pdf).

However, to make a truly profound impact beyond the circle of initial supporters requires getting funding to promote the Pro-Truth Pledge to a broad audience. Unfortunately, the ground-breaking innovation offered by the Pro-Truth Pledge means that traditional institutional donors who support initiatives to fight misinformation and protect democracy have chosen not to fund it, since it doesn't fit into their traditional narrow investment categories.

SAGE is a non-traditional funder of such efforts. Its commitment to social science research, combined with its flexibility and dedication to choosing the most effective strategies as an independent company, caused it to extend sponsorship to the pledge. This investment is part of a broader portfolio, as SAGE has been involved with a number of recent efforts to promote truth-oriented behavior. This includes publishing new resources that promote critical thinking, such as: Tom Chatfield's Critical Thinking: Your Guide to Effective Argument, Successful Analysis and Independent Study (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/critial-thinking/book248140); supporting MisinfoCon DC (https://misinfocon.com/misinfocon-4-0-washington-dc-1b6ed42c5514), which brought together a group of people to identify policy and regulatory methods of fighting misinformation; and sponsoring Public Editor (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/press/sage-publishing-sponsors-public-editor-to-enable-evaluation-of-the-news-at-scale), a high-scale content analysis tool that involves digital volunteers in multi-layered, simultaneous assessments of news articles.

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For more information, please contact:

For SAGE Publishing: Camille Gamboa, PR & Public Affairs Manage, camille.gamboa@sagepub.com, 1-800-818-7243

For Pro-Truth Pledge: Gleb Tsipursky, Pro-Truth Pledge Co-Founder, gleb@intentionalinsights.org, (614) 407-4016

Brief description of SAGE Publishing

Sara Miller McCune founded SAGE Publishing in 1965 to support the dissemination of usable knowledge and educate a global community. SAGE is a leading international provider of innovative, high-quality content publishing more than 1,000 journals and over 900 new books each year, spanning a wide range of subject areas. Our growing selection of library products includes archives, data, case studies and video. SAGE remains majority owned by our founder and after her lifetime will become owned by a charitable trust that secures the company's continued independence. Principal offices are located in Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC and Melbourne. www.sagepublishing.com (http://www.sagepub.com/)

Brief description of Pro-Truth Pledge

We believe that fighting misinformation and protecting truth and facts in our public discourse requires differentiating those who spread misinformation from truth-tellers, rewarding truth-tellers with a better reputation, and uniting truth-tellers in a cohesive constituency across the political spectrum. The Pro-Truth Pledge at ProTruthPledge.org offers an easy way to do so by reclaiming the fuzzy concept of "truth," which different people can interpret differently, with 12 clearly-observable behaviors listed on the pledge website that research in behavioral science shows correlate with truthfulness. Private citizens, public figures, and organizations can take the pledge. Private citizens get the benefit of contributing to a more truthful society. Public figures and organizations get reputational rewards, since the pledge provides them with external credibility by holding them accountable through crowd-sourced fact-checking. The pledge has significant traction, with positive media coverage in prominent US and international media venues on the right and left, such as Newsweek, The Guardian, The Daily Caller, Raw Story, Scientific American, NPR, CBS News, and elsewhere. Over 600 Republican, Democratic, and minor party politicians across the political spectrum took the pledge, whether state-level ones such as members of state legislatures Eric Nelson (PA), James White (TX), and Ogden Driskell (WY), or national politicians such as members of US Congress Beto O'Rourke (TX), Matt Cartwright (PA), and Marcia Fudge (OH). https://protruthpledge.org