YouTube has been implicated in the transformation of users into extremists and conspiracy theorists. The alleged mechanism for this radicalizing process is YouTube’s recommender system, which is optimized to amplify and promote clips that users are likely to watch through to the end. YouTube optimizes for watch-through for economic reasons: people who watch a video through to the end are likely to then watch the next recommended video as well, which means that more advertisements can be served to them. This (...) is a seemingly innocuous design choice, but it has a troubling side-effect. Critics of YouTube have alleged that the recommender system tends to recommend extremist content and conspiracy theories, as such videos are especially likely to capture and keep users’ attention. To date, the problem of radicalization via the YouTube recommender system has been a matter of speculation. The current study represents the first systematic, pre-registered attempt to establish whether and to what extent the recommender system tends to promote such content. We begin by contextualizing our study in the framework of technological seduction. Next, we explain our methodology. After that, we present our results, which are consistent with the radicalization hypothesis. Finally, we discuss our findings, as well as directions for future research and recommendations for users, industry, and policy-makers. (shrink)

Intellectual humility is commonly thought to be a mindset, disposition, or personality trait that guides our reactions to evidence as we seek to pursue the truth and avoid error. Over the last decade, psychologists, philosophers, and other researchers have begun to explore intellectual humility, using analytical and empirical tools to understand its nature, implications, and value. This review describes central questions explored by researchers and highlights opportunities for multidisciplinary investigation.

The epistemic attitudes of scientists, such as epistemic tolerance and authoritarianism, play important roles in the discourse about rivaling theories. Epistemic tolerance stands for the mental attitude of an epistemic agent, e.g., a scientist, who is open to opposing views, while epistemic authoritarianism represents the tendency to uncritically accept views of authorities. Another relevant epistemic factor when it comes to the epistemic decisions of scientists is the skepticism towards the scientific method. However, the question is whether these epistemic attitudes are (...) influenced by their sociopolitical counterparts, such as the researcher’s degree of conservatism. To empirically investigate the interplay between epistemic and sociopolitical attitudes of scientists, we conducted a survey with researchers (N = 655) across different disciplines. We propose scales for measuring epistemic tolerance and epistemic authoritarianism, as well as a scale for detecting the participants' readiness to question the scientific method. Furthermore, we investigate the relationship between epistemic tolerance and epistemic authoritarianism on the one hand, and career stage and sociopolitical views on the other hand. Interestingly, our study found only small correlations between the participants' degree of conservatism and their epistemic attitudes. This suggests that political views, against common argumentation, actually do not play an important role in one’s scientific decisions. Moreover, social scientists scored higher on the epistemic tolerance and lower on the epistemic authoritarianism scale than natural scientists. Finally, the results indicate that natural scientists question the scientific method less than social scientists. (shrink)

Why are mistaken beliefs about Covid-19 so prevalent? Political identity, education and other demographic variables explain only a part of individual differences in the susceptibility to Covid-19 misinformation. This paper focuses on another explanation: epistemic vice. Epistemic vices are character traits that interfere with acquiring, maintaining, and transmitting knowledge. If the basic assumption of vice epistemology is right, then people with epistemic vices such as indifference to the truth or rigidity in their belief structures will tend to be more susceptible (...) to believing Covid-19 misinformation. We carried out an observational study (US sample, n = 998) in which we measured the level of epistemic vice of participants using a novel Epistemic Vice Scale. We also asked participants questions eliciting the extent to which they subscribe to myths and misinformation about Covid-19. We find overwhelming evidence to the effect that epistemic vice is associated with susceptibility to Covid-19 misinformation. In fact, the association turns out to be stronger than with political identity, educational attainment, scores on the Cognitive Reflection Test, personality, dogmatism, and need for closure. We conclude that this offers evidence in favor of the empirical presuppositions of vice epistemology. (shrink)

One of the first things that comes to mind when we think of the special issue’s theme, “Trust in a Social and Digital World” is the epidemic of ‘fake news’ and a cluster of trust- relevant vices we commonly associate with those who share it, click on it, and believe it. Fake news consumers are, among other things, gullible and naïve. Many are also dogmatic: intellectually and/or emotionally tied to a view point, and as a result, too quick to uncritically (...) trust whatever aligns with it. Gullibility, naivety, and dogmatism are all examples of vices that lead to us trust when we shouldn’t. The effects of these kinds of vices can be dangerous. Our aim here, however, is to explore the other side of the coin: those character vices that lead us to refrain from trusting when we should trust. For ease of reference, call these vices of distrust. Vices of distrust are dangerous in their own right, and in ways that often harm others along with oneself. The three vices of distrust we want explore—with a particular focus on their manifestations online—are: closemindedness, emulousness, and arrogance. Each contributes to vicious distrust in its own distinctive way. (shrink)

In the past two decades, epistemologists have significantly expanded the focus of their field. To the traditional question that has dominated the debate — under what conditions does belief amount to knowledge? — they have added questions about testimony, epistemic virtues and vices, epistemic trust, and more. This broadening of the range of epistemic concern has coincided with an expansion in conceptions of epistemic agency beyond the individualism characteristic of most earlier epistemology. We believe that these developments have not gone (...) far enough. While the weak anti-individualism we see in contemporary epistemology may be adequate for the kinds of cases it tends to focus on, a great deal of human knowledge production and transmission does not conform to these models. Furthermore, the dispositions and norms that are knowledge-conducive in the familiar cases may not be knowledge-conducive generally. In fact, dispositions that, at an individual level, count as epistemic vices may be epistemic virtues in common social contexts. We argue that this overlooked feature of human social life means that epistemology must become more deeply and pervasively social. (shrink)

This paper presents two studies on the development and validation of a ten-item scale of epistemic vice and the relationship between epistemic vice and misinformation and fake news. Epistemic vices have been defined as character traits that interfere with acquiring, maintaining, and transmitting knowledge. Examples of epistemic vice are gullibility and indifference to knowledge. It has been hypothesized that epistemically vicious people are especially susceptible to misinformation and conspiracy theories. We conducted one exploratory and one confirmatory observational survey study on (...) Amazon Mechanical Turk among people living in the United States (total _N_ = 1737). We show that two psychological traits underlie the range of epistemic vices that we investigated: indifference to truth and rigidity. Indifference manifests itself in a lack of motivation to find the truth. Rigidity manifests itself in being insensitive to evidence. We develop a scale to measure epistemic vice with the subscales indifference and rigidity. The Epistemic Vice Scale is internally consistent; has good convergent, divergent, and discriminant validity; and is strongly associated with the endorsement of misinformation and conspiracy theories. Epistemic vice explains additional variance in the endorsement of misinformation and conspiracy theories over and above demographic and related psychological concepts and shows medium to large effect sizes across outcome measures. We demonstrate that epistemic vice differs from existing psychological constructs, and show that the scale can explain individual differences in dealing with misinformation and conspiracy theories. We conclude that epistemic vice might contribute to “postfactive” ways of thinking. (shrink)

Much work on intellectual humility has focused on its epistemic benefits. We suggest that displaying (or failing to display) intellectual humility also has effects on how others perceive us and that, as a result, intellectual humility can serve reputation management purposes, in at least four ways: (i) Intellectual humility can be used to signal we are a good source of information; (ii) Intellectual humility can be used to signal we are competent through countersignaling; (iii) Intellectual humility can be used to (...) make sure others do not believe we are overclaiming superiority; (iv) lack of intellectual humility (or intellectual arrogance) can be used to signal dominance. The evidence suggests that intellectual humility (or lack thereof) can have each of these effects. Seeing intellectual humility as (inter alia) a reputation management tool predicts that people will be more or less likely to display intellectual humility in some contexts. For instance, people in a position of power might stand to lose less if they fail to be intellectual humble; accordingly, evidence suggests that they tend to display less intellectual humility. In conclusion, we speculate that understanding intellectual humility as reputation management could help construct environments more conducive to displays of intellectual humility. (shrink)

Intellectual humility has attracted attention in both philosophy and psychology. Philosophers have clarified the nature of intellectual humility as an epistemic virtue; and psychologists have developed scales for measuring people’s intellectual humility. Much less attention has been paid to the potential effects of intellectual humility on people’s negative attitudes and to its relationship with prejudice-based epistemic vices. Here we fill these gaps by focusing on the relationship between intellectual humility and prejudice. To clarify this relationship, we conducted four empirical studies. (...) The results of these studies show three things. First, people are systematically prejudiced towards members of groups perceived as dissimilar. Second, intellectual humility weakens the association between perceived dissimilarity and prejudice. Third, more intellectual humility is associated withmoreprejudice overall. We show that this apparently paradoxical pattern of results is consistent with the idea that it is both psychologically and rationally plausible that one person is at the same time intellectually humble, epistemically virtuous and strongly prejudiced. (shrink)

We define humility as the ability to realistically assess one’s limitations and strengths. Unlike other moral virtues, humility has been found distinctively difficult to acquire. Our paper makes two significant contributions. Although the role and importance of humility have been clearly established in the literature, our paper is the first to empirically test a theoretically-posited inter-relationship between humility and the moral virtues. Our paper empirically tests this relationship, specifically between humility and the social virtues with the personal virtues acting as (...) a mediator. The second contribution of our paper is to present the design and delivery of a humility-embedded pedagogical teaching and learning approach using a professional ethics course. Essentially, we are suggesting a methodology that make ethics education more effective. We follow Sims and Felton : 297–312, 2006) analytical framework that incorporates targeted learning outcomes, environment, processes, and experience facilitated through a student-led pedagogical approach. We utilize the concept of “critical consciousness”, developed by Jagger and Volkman : 177–185, 2013), which is captured through the mechanisms of a Student Learning Portfolio and a Process-Oriented-Guided-Enquiry approach. Both these mechanisms incorporate critical self-reflection and the application of knowledge derived from experience. Our findings have significant implications for the effective teaching of ethics, and more generally for business and management education. (shrink)