Credulity rather than general trust may increase vulnerability to fraud in older adults: a moderated mediation model.

The present study aimed to clarify whether it is credulity or general trust that specifically affects vulnerability to fraud, as well as investigating the mediating role of susceptibility to persuasion and the moderating role of greed in this relationship. 254 Chinese older adults completed measures of credulity, general trust, susceptibility to persuasion, greed, and vulnerability to fraud. The results showed that credulity, but not general trust, was positively correlated with vulnerability to fraud, after controlling for demographic covariates. Susceptibility to persuasion partially mediated the effect of credulity on vulnerability to fraud. In addition, this mediating effect of susceptibility to persuasion was only significant in older adults with higher levels of greed. Our findings suggest that credulity, rather than general trust, is a risk factor in vulnerability to fraud among older adults, and may inform the development of supportive interventions to reduce this population's risk of falling victim to fraud.

Political Orientation Predicts Credulity Regarding Putative Hazards.

To benefit from information provided by other people, people must be somewhat credulous. However, credulity entails risks. The optimal level of credulity depends on the relative costs of believing misinformation and failing to attend to accurate information. When information concerns hazards, erroneous incredulity is often more costly than erroneous credulity, given that disregarding accurate warnings is more harmful than adopting unnecessary precautions. Because no equivalent asymmetry exists for information concerning benefits, people should generally be more credulous of hazard information than of benefit information. This adaptive negatively biased credulity is linked to negativity bias in general and is more prominent among people who believe the world to be more dangerous. Because both threat sensitivity and beliefs about the dangerousness of the world differ between conservatives and liberals, we predicted that conservatism would positively correlate with negatively biased credulity. Two online studies of Americans supported this prediction, potentially illuminating how politicians' alarmist claims affect different portions of the electorate.

Preschoolers' credulity toward misinformation from ingroup versus outgroup speakers.

The current research examined preschoolers' credulity toward misinformation from ingroup versus outgroup speakers. Experiment 1 showed that when searching for a hidden toy, Caucasian English monolingual 4-year-olds were credulous toward the false testimony of a race-and-accent ingroup speaker, despite their firsthand observations of the hiding event, but were skeptical when the false testimony was provided by a race-and-accent outgroup speaker. In the same experiment, 3-year-olds were credulous toward the false testimony of both speakers. Experiment 2 showed that when the false testimony was provided by a same-race-only or same-accent-only speaker, 4-year-olds were not particularly credulous or skeptical. The findings are discussed in relation to how intergroup bias might contribute to the selective credulity in the 4-year-olds as well as the factors that might explain the indiscriminate credulity in the 3-year-olds.

Iranian adaptation of the Epistemic Trust, Mistrust, and Credulity Questionnaire (ETMCQ): Validity, reliability, discriminant ability, and sex invariance.

INTRODUCTION: Epistemic trust, or trust in transmitted knowledge, has been proposed as a critical factor in psychopathology and psychotherapy. This study aimed at evaluating the psychometric properties of the Epistemic Trust, Mistrust, and Credulity Questionnaire (ETMCQ) in Iran. METHOD: Data were collected from 906 participants. Along with the ETMCQ, measures of mentalizing, mindfulness, perspective-taking, attachment, emotion dysregulation, and borderline personality disorder were administered. Confirmatory factor analysis and exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM) were used to determine factorial structure. RESULTS: The ESEM model showed an acceptable fit and outperformed the confirmatory model. A 14-item version of the ETMCQ was retained after examining item performance. Our findings also established criterion-related validity for mistrust and credulity, an acceptable internal consistency for credulity, discriminant power for mistrust and credulity in detecting positive screens for borderline personality disorder, and measurement invariance across sexes. CONCLUSION: This study provides evidence for the cross-cultural applicability of the ETMCQ. Nonetheless, the validity of the trust and internal consistency of the mistrust subscale require particular attention in future research.

Monkeypox: New epidemic or fake news? Study of psychological and social factors associated with fake news attitudes of monkeypox in Italy.

Objective: Starting from May 2022, a growing number of monkeypox cases have been identified in several countries in Europe and the United States. To date, information on social reaction to the news circulating about monkeypox is limited. Assessing psychological and social elements related to the tendency to misinterpret monkeypox information is urgent and useful in setting up tailored education and prevention programs for specific populations. The present study aims to explore the association of selected psychological and social variables to monkeypox attitudes as fake news. Methods: Three hundred and thirty-three participants (212 women, 110 men, and 11 other genders) from the general Italian population completed nine self-report measures. Results: Results showed that people that were more likely to believe that monkeypox was a hoax were: older, heterosexual, politically conservative, and more religious. Moreoverm they were more likely to show more negative attitudes toward gay men, higher levels of sexual moralism, less knowledge and fear about monkeypox, no previous infections of COVID-19, lower number of COVID-19 vaccine doses, and being closer to no-vax theories. On the psychological side, participants that were more likely to believe that the monkeypox was a hoax were associated with lower levels of epistemic trust and order traits, with higher levels of epistemic mistrust, close-mindedness, and ability to process emotions. A full mediation model which explores the relationships between the main variables related to fake news attitudes toward monkeypox was tested, reporting good fit indices. Conclusion: Results from the current study could be helpful to improve the effectiveness of health communication, design targeted education, and support people to engage in healthier behaviors.

Plausibility matters: A challenge to Gilbert's "Spinozan" account of belief formation.

Most of the claims we encounter in real life can be assigned some degree of plausibility, even if they are new to us. On Gilbert's (1991) influential account of belief formation, whereby understanding a sentence implies representing it as true, all new propositions are initially accepted, before any assessment of their veracity. As a result, plausibility cannot have any role in initial belief formation on this account. In order to isolate belief formation experimentally, Gilbert, Krull, and Malone (1990) employed a dual-task design: if a secondary task disrupts participants' evaluation of novel claims presented to them, then the initial encoding should be all there is, and if that initial encoding consistently renders claims 'true' (even where participants were told in the learning phase that the claims they had seen were false), then Gilbert's account is confirmed. In this pre-registered study, we replicate one of Gilbert et al.'s (1990) seminal studies ("The Hopi Language Experiment") while additionally introducing a plausibility variable. Our results show that Gilbert's 'truth bias' does not hold for implausible statements - instead, initial encoding seemingly renders implausible statements 'false'. As alternative explanations of this finding that would be compatible with Gilbert's account can be ruled out, it questions Gilbert's account.

Corrigendum: The Effect of Analytic Cognitive Style on Credulity.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.584424.].

Believing what you're told: young children's trust in unexpected testimony about the physical world.

How do children resolve conflicts between a self-generated belief and what they are told? Four studies investigated the circumstances under which toddlers would trust testimony that conflicted with their expectations about the physical world. Thirty-month-olds believed testimony that conflicted with a naive bias (Study 1), and they also repeatedly trusted testimony that conflicted with an event they had just seen (Study 2)-even when they had an incentive to ignore the testimony (Study 3). Children responded more skeptically if they could see that the testimony was wrong as it was being delivered (Study 3), or if they had the opportunity to accumulate evidence confirming their initial belief before hearing someone contradict it (Study 4). Together, these studies demonstrate that toddlers have a robust bias to trust even surprising testimony, but this trust can be influenced by how much confidence they have in their initial belief.

The Effect of Analytic Cognitive Style on Credulity.

Belief in astrology remains strong even today, and one of the explanations why some people endorse paranormal explanations is the individual differences in analytical thinking. Therefore, the main aim of this paper was to determine the effects of priming an analytical or intuitive thinking style on the credulity of participants. In two experiments (N = 965), analytic thinking was induced and the source of fake profile (astrological reading vs. psychological testing) was manipulated and participants' prior paranormal beliefs, anomalous explanation, cognitive reflection, and depression were measured. Although analytic thinking was proved to be hard to induce experimentally, the results showed that analytic thinking predicts credulity and belief in the paranormal was linked with experiencing more anomalous experiences and more paranormal explanations. The more people were able to think analytically, the less credulous they were as reflected in the lower acceptance of fake profile as accurate.

A neuropsychological test of belief and doubt: damage to ventromedial prefrontal cortex increases credulity for misleading advertising.

We have proposed the False Tagging Theory (FTT) as a neurobiological model of belief and doubt processes. The theory posits that the prefrontal cortex is critical for normative doubt toward properly comprehended ideas or cognitions. Such doubt is important for advantageous decisions, for example in the financial and consumer purchasing realms. Here, using a neuropsychological approach, we put the FTT to an empirical test, hypothesizing that focal damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) would cause a "doubt deficit" that would result in higher credulity and purchase intention for consumer products featured in misleading advertisements. We presented 8 consumer ads to 18 patients with focal brain damage to the vmPFC, 21 patients with focal brain damage outside the prefrontal cortex, and 10 demographically similar healthy comparison participants. Patients with vmPFC damage were (1) more credulous to misleading ads; and (2) showed the highest intention to purchase the products in the misleading advertisements, relative to patients with brain damage outside the prefrontal cortex and healthy comparison participants. The pattern of findings was obtained even for ads in which the misleading bent was "corrected" by a disclaimer. The evidence is consistent with our proposal that damage to the vmPFC disrupts a "false tagging mechanism" which normally produces doubt and skepticism for cognitive representations. We suggest that the disruption increases credulity for misleading information, even when the misleading information is corrected for by a disclaimer. This mechanism could help explain poor financial decision-making when persons with ventromedial prefrontal dysfunction (e.g., caused by neurological injury or aging) are exposed to persuasive information.