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The information humans are exposed to has grown exponentially. This has placed increased demands upon our information selection strategies resulting in reduced fact-checking and critical-thinking time. Prior research shows that problem solving (traditionally measured using the Cognitive Reflection Test-CRT) negatively correlates with believing in false information. We argue that this result is specifically related to insight problem solving. Solutions via insight are the result of parallel processing, characterized by filtering external noise, and, unlike cognitively controlled thinking, it does not suffer from the cognitive overload associated with processing multiple sources of information. We administered the Compound Remote Associate Test (problems used to investigate insight problem solving) as well as the CRT, 20 fake and real news headlines, the bullshit, and overclaiming scales to a sample of 61 participants. Results show that insight problem solving predicts better identification of fake news and bullshit (over and above traditional measures i.e., the CRT), and is associated with reduced overclaiming. These results have implications for understanding individual differences in susceptibility to believing false information.

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Widespread dissemination of misinformation about climate change has seriously harmed the health of future generations and the world. Moreover, misinformation-sharing behaviors exhibit strong individual characteristics. However, research is limited on the antecedents of and mechanism underlying the willingness to share misinformation about climate change in terms of individual personalities and physiological states. Accordingly, we surveyed 582 women (224 pregnant) using a questionnaire and constructed a moderated mediation model to explore the relationships among individuals' bullshit receptivity, belief in misinformation about climate change, willingness to share misinformation about climate change, and pregnancy. The results showed that: (1) bullshit receptivity is positively related to the willingness to share misinformation about climate change; (2) belief in misinformation about climate change mediates the relationship between bullshit receptivity and willingness to share misinformation about climate change; and (3) for individuals with higher bullshit receptivity, pregnancy exacerbates the detrimental effects of bullshit receptivity on belief in misinformation about climate change.

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A consistent finding reported in the literature is that epistemically suspect beliefs (e.g., paranormal beliefs) are less frequently endorsed by individuals with a greater tendency to think analytically. However, these results have been observed predominantly in Western participants. In the present work, we explore various individual differences known to predict epistemically suspect beliefs across both Western and Eastern cultures. Across four studies with Japanese (n = 666) and Western (n = 650) individuals, we find that the association between thinking style and beliefs varied as a function of culture. Specifically, while Westerners who scored higher on measures of Type-2 analytic thinking tended to endorse epistemically suspect beliefs less, this association was not observed in Japanese samples, suggesting that the often-observed negative association between analytic thinking and epistemically suspect beliefs may be exclusive to Western individuals. Additionally, we demonstrate that a tendency to think holistically (specifically with regards to causality) is positively associated with the endorsement of epistemically suspect beliefs within both samples. Overall, we discuss how various individual differences predict the endorsement of epistemically suspect beliefs across cultures.

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Understanding the predictors of belief in COVID-related conspiracy theories and willingness to get vaccinated against COVID-19 may aid the resolution of current and future pandemics. We investigate how psychological and cognitive characteristics influence general conspiracy mentality and COVID-related conspiracy theories. A cross-sectional study was conducted based on data from an online survey of a sample of Czech university students (n = 866) collected in January 2021, using multivariate linear regression and mediation analysis. Sixteen percent of respondents believed that COVID-19 is a hoax, and 17% believed that COVID-19 was intentionally created by humans. Seven percent of the variance of the hoax theory and 10% of the variance of the creation theory was explained by (in descending order of relevance) low cognitive reflection, low digital health literacy, high experience with dissociation and, to some extent, high bullshit receptivity. Belief in COVID-related conspiracy theories depended less on psychological and cognitive variables compared to conspiracy mentality (16% of the variance explained). The effect of digital health literacy on belief in COVID-related theories was moderated by cognitive reflection. Belief in conspiracy theories related to COVID-19 was influenced by experience with dissociation, cognitive reflection, digital health literacy and bullshit receptivity.

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The study aims to test whether simple priming of deepfake (DF) information significantly increases users' ability to recognize DF media. Although undoubtedly fascinating from a technological point of view, these highly realistic artificial intelligent (AI)-generated fake videos hold high deceptive potential. Both practitioners and institutions are thus joining forces to develop debunking strategies to counter the spread of such difficult-to-recognize and potentially misleading video content. On this premise, this study addresses the following research questions: does simple priming with the definition of DFs and information about their potentially harmful applications increase users' ability to recognize DFs? Does bullshit receptivity, as an individual tendency to be overly accepting of epistemically suspect beliefs, moderate the relationship between such priming and DF recognition? Results indicate that the development of strategies to counter the deceitfulness of DFs from an educational and cultural perspective might work well, but only for people with a lower susceptibility to believe willfully misleading claims. Finally, through a serial mediation analysis, we show that DF recognition does, in turn, negatively impact users' sharing intention, thus limiting the potential harm of DFs at the very root of one of their strengths: virality. We discuss the implications of our finding that society's defense against DFs could benefit from a simple reasoned digital literacy intervention.

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Research into both receptivity to falling for bullshit and the propensity to produce it have recently emerged as active, independent areas of inquiry into the spread of misleading information. However, it remains unclear whether those who frequently produce bullshit are inoculated from its influence. For example, both bullshit receptivity and bullshitting frequency are negatively related to cognitive ability and aspects of analytic thinking style, suggesting that those who frequently engage in bullshitting may be more likely to fall for bullshit. However, separate research suggests that individuals who frequently engage in deception are better at detecting it, thus leading to the possibility that frequent bullshitters may be less likely to fall for bullshit. Here, we present three studies (N = 826) attempting to distinguish between these competing hypotheses, finding that frequency of persuasive bullshitting (i.e., bullshitting intended to impress or persuade others) positively predicts susceptibility to various types of misleading information and that this association is robust to individual differences in cognitive ability and analytic cognitive style.

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OBJECTIVE: Fake news represents a particularly egregious and direct avenue by which inaccurate beliefs have been propagated via social media. We investigate the psychological profile of individuals who fall prey to fake news. METHOD: We recruited 1,606 participants from Amazon's Mechanical Turk for three online surveys. RESULTS: The tendency to ascribe profundity to randomly generated sentences-pseudo-profound bullshit receptivity-correlates positively with perceptions of fake news accuracy, and negatively with the ability to differentiate between fake and real news (media truth discernment). Relatedly, individuals who overclaim their level of knowledge also judge fake news to be more accurate. We also extend previous research indicating that analytic thinking correlates negatively with perceived accuracy by showing that this relationship is not moderated by the presence/absence of the headline's source (which has no effect on accuracy), or by familiarity with the headlines (which correlates positively with perceived accuracy of fake and real news). CONCLUSION: Our results suggest that belief in fake news may be driven, to some extent, by a general tendency to be overly accepting of weak claims. This tendency, which we refer to as reflexive open-mindedness, may be partly responsible for the prevalence of epistemically suspect beliefs writ large.

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This research systematically mapped the relationship between political ideology and receptivity to pseudo-profound bullshit-that is, obscure sentences constructed to impress others rather than convey truth. Among Swedish adults (N = 985), bullshit receptivity was (a) robustly positively associated with socially conservative (vs. liberal) self-placement, resistance to change, and particularly binding moral intuitions (loyalty, authority, purity); (b) associated with centrism on preference for equality and even leftism (when controlling for other aspects of ideology) on economic ideology self-placement; and (c) lowest among right-of-center social liberal voters and highest among left-wing green voters. Most of the results held up when we controlled for the perceived profundity of genuine aphorisms, cognitive reflection, numeracy, information processing bias, gender, age, education, religiosity, and spirituality. The results are supportive of theoretical accounts that posit ideological asymmetries in cognitive orientation, while also pointing to the existence of bullshit receptivity among both right- and left-wingers.

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