Here's a link to the penultimate draft (not for citation): https://www.academia.edu/46814693/The_Signaling_Function_of_Sharing_Fake_Stories

This broad thesis sounds to me like something I've read before, perhaps in George Lakoff about people signaling group membership or perhaps people with respect to their voting tendencies. The question isn't who should I vote for specifically, but who would someone like me (ie. who would my group, my tribe) vote for?

This sort of phenomena is likely easier to see/show in sports fans who will tell blatant untruths or delude themselves about the teams of which they are fans.The team winning at all costs will cause them to put on blinders.

A particular recent example of something like this with relation to what might otherwise be a logical business decision is seen in incoming Amazon CEO Andy Jassy nixing the idea of building in Philadelphia due to his own NFL fandom https://www.phillyvoice.com/amazon-hq2-philly-eagles-giants-rivalry-andy-jassy-jeff-bezos-amazon-unbound/

Why would someone make a potential multi-million dollar decision over their sports preference?

Is this responsible for some of the "group think" seen in the Republican party and the political right? Imitation of bad or counter-intuitive actions outweights scientifically proven better actions? Examples: anti-vaxxers and coronavirus no-masker behaviors? (Some of this may also be about or even entangled with George Lakoff's (?) tribal identity theories relating to "people like me".

Explore this area more deeply.

Another contributing factor for this effect may be the small-town effect as most Republican party members are in the countryside (as opposed to the larger cities which tend to be more Democratic). City dwellers are more likely to be more insular in their interpersonal relations whereas country dwellers may have more social ties to other people and groups and therefor make them more tribal in their social interrelationships. Can I find data to back up this claim?

How does link to the thesis put forward by Joseph Henrich in The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous? Does Henrich have data about city dwellers to back up my claim above?

What does this tension have to do with the increasing (and potentially evolutionary) propensity of humans to live in ever-increasingly larger and more dense cities versus maintaining their smaller historic numbers prior to the pre-agricultural timeperiod?

What are the biological effects on human evolution as a result of these cultural pressures? Certainly our cultural evolution is effecting our biological evolution?

What about the effects of communication media on our cultural and biological evolution? Memes, orality versus literacy, film, radio, television, etc.? Can we tease out these effects within the socio-politico-cultural sphere on the greater span of humanity? Can we find breaks, signs, or symptoms at the border of mass agriculture?

total aside, though related to evolution: link hypercycles to evolution spirals?

Victor, S. E., Trieu, T. H., & Seymour, N. (2021). LGBTQ+ mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic: Testing mechanisms and moderators of risk. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/3famu

Examples of this sort of non-logical behaviour used to represent identity can be found in fiction in:

• Dr. Seuss' The Butter Battle Book (Random House,1984) which is based on
• the war between Lilliput and Blefuscu in Jonathan Swift's 1726 satire Gulliver's Travels, which was based on an argument over the correct end to crack an egg once soft-boiled.

It almost seems related to creating identity politics as bike-shedding because the real issues are so complex that most people can't grasp all the nuances, so it's easier to choose sides based on some completely other heuristic. Changing sides later on causes too much cognitive dissonance, so once on a path, one must stick to it.

Haslam, S. A., Steffens, N. K., Reicher, S., & Bentley, S. (2020). Identity leadership in a crisis: A 5R framework for learning from responses to COVID-19. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/bhj49

Cruwys, T., Stevens, M., Donaldson, J. L., Cardenas, D., Platow, M. J., Reynolds, K. J., & Fong, P. (2021). Perceived COVID-19 risk is attenuated by ingroup trust: Evidence from three empirical studies. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/94sd3

Federico, Christopher, Agnieszka Golec, and Tomasz Baran. ‘Collective Narcissism, In-Group Satisfaction, and Solidarity in the Face of COVID-19’. Preprint. PsyArXiv, 3 September 2020. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/j6ut3.

Moya, C., Cruz y Celis Peniche, P. D., Kline, M. A., & Smaldino, P. (2020). Dynamics of Behavior Change in the COVID World [Preprint]. SocArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/kxajh

Smith-Keiling, Beverly L., Archana Sharma, Sheritta M. Fagbodun, Harsimranjit K. Chahal, Keyaira Singleton, Hari Gopalakrishnan, Katrina E. Paleologos, et al. “Starting the Conversation: Initial Listening and Identity Approaches to Community Cultural Wellness,.” Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education 21, no. 1 (April 10, 2020). https://doi.org/10.1128/jmbe.v21i1.2073.

Forging those group identities helped set up a strong base for creating different cultures.and also set up future pathways for ideas and theories among these groups.