Finally getting more scientific proof that religion literally rots people brains. Pretty cool stuff
From the article.
“Another caveat is that the relationship between different styles of thinking and belief in fake news was not so large (see below).”That about sums it up. Utterly uninteresting study.
If you actually look at their graphic for religious fundamentalism the exact same proportion of the least fundamentalist and the most fundamentalist rated fake news as very accurate.
Thus you are left with statistical wizardry and trying to claim that the fact that the fundamentalists surveyed were slightly less likely to rate fake news as not at all accurate and instead slightly more likely to rate it not very accurate is somehow profound and meaningful.
The study results for the delusional are even more trivial. Study shows confirmed paranoid delusional people are more likely to believe things that are not true. Can't say that's a surprise.
I should have left out a link to the article.
These studies established that delusion-prone individuals,
dogmatic individuals, and religious fundamentalists are more
likely to believe fake news. Mediation analyses suggested that
these relationships may be partially or fully explained by reduced
engagement in actively open-minded and analytic thinking,
which may broadly discourage implausible beliefs.
These results build upon prior work relating analytic thinking
to reduced belief in fake news (Pennycook & Rand, 2018a,
2018b) by suggesting that reductions in analytic thinking and a
related concept, actively open-minded thinking (see Campitelli
& Labollita, 2010), may increase belief in fake news across
multiple groups of people. It follows from this suggestion
that interventions designed to increase analytic thinking (Ward
& Garety, 2017) or actively open-minded thinking (Gürc¸ayMorris,
2016) may help keep delusion-prone and dogmatic
individuals, as well as religious fundamentalists, from falling
for fake news. Because these interventions target specific mechanisms
putatively contributing to belief in fake news, they may
be more successful than previous interventions, such as explicit
“warning” labels, which have sometimes inadvertently encouraged
belief in un-warned fake news (see Pennycook & Rand,
2017). Future research should therefore examine these potential
interventions’ efficacy.
How is that not interesting discussion?
Also, results are interesting;
Zero-order correlations between all measures can be found
in Table 2 (for the combined dataset) and SI Section S10
(for individual data collection waves). Delusion-like ideation,
dogmatism, and religious fundamentalism were all positively
correlated with belief in fake news (see Figure 2), but uncorrelated
(delusion-like ideation and religious fundamentalism)
or negatively correlated (dogmatism) with belief in real news.
Delusion-like ideation, dogmatism, religious fundamentalism,
and belief in fake news were all negatively correlated with analytic
and actively open-minded thinking, whereas belief in real
news was positively correlated with analytic and actively openminded
thinking.
