… Humans aren’t well wired to act on complex statistical risks. We care a lot more about the tangible present than the distant future. Many of us do that to the extreme — what behavioral scientists call hyperbolic discounting — which makes it particularly hard to grapple with something like […] Read more »
Who Falls for Fake News? The Roles of Analytic Thinking, Motivated Reasoning, Political Ideology, and Bullshit Receptivity
Inaccurate beliefs pose a threat to democracy and fake news represents a particularly egregious and direct avenue by which inaccurate beliefs have been propagated via social media. Here we investigate the cognitive psychological profile of individuals who fall prey to fake news. CONT. Gordon Pennycook & David G. Rand, Yale […] Read more »
Researchers Examine When People Are More Susceptible To Fake News
Whether people consume news in a social setting or alone can affect how likely they are to fact-check. Research suggests people let their guard down when they’re in groups and become less skeptical. Morning Edition, NPR News Read more »
A Superhero Power for Our Time: How to Handle the Truth
… A decade ago, the comedian Stephen Colbert introduced viewers to the idea of “truthiness,” a quality belonging to claims that were based on gut feelings instead of facts. Last year, the Oxford Dictionaries named the word “post-truth” the word of the year. It’s a description of a general characteristic […] Read more »
Why is climate change such a hard sell in the US?
People gather outside the White House in Washington, D.C. on Thursday, June 1, 2017, to protest President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate change accord. AP Photo/Susan Walsh Firmin DeBrabander, Maryland Institute College of Art President Donald Trump on June 1 took the dramatic […] Read more »
You’re Not Going to Change Your Mind
… It recently struck us that confirmation bias is often conflated with “telling people what they want to hear,” which is actually a distinct phenomenon known as desirability bias, or the tendency to credit information you want to believe. … So we decided to conduct an experiment that would isolate […] Read more »