Putting Truth to the Test
hubie writes:
BC psychologists probe the roots of truth judgments in the 'post-truth' era:
Putting truth to the test in the "post-truth" era, Boston College psychologists conducted experiments that show when Americans decide whether a claim of fact should qualify as true or false, they consider the intentions of the information source, the team reported recently in Nature's Scientific Reports.
That confidence is based on what individuals think the source is trying to do - in this case either informing or deceiving their audience.
"Even when people know precisely how accurate or inaccurate a claim of fact is, whether they consider that claim to be true or false hinges on the intentions they attribute to the claim's information source," said Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience Liane Young, an author of the report. "In other words, the intentions of information sources sway people's judgments about what information should qualify as true."
Lead author Isaac Handley-Miner, a PhD student and researcher in Young's Morality Lab, said the so-called post-truth era has revealed vigorous disagreement over the truth of claims of fact - even for claims that are easy to verify.
"That disagreement has alarmed our society," said Handley-Miner. "After all, it's often assumed that the labels 'true' and 'false' should correspond to the objective accuracy of a claim. But is objective accuracy actually the only criterion people consider when deciding what should qualify as true or false? Or, even when people know how objectively accurate a given claim of fact is, might they be sensitive to features of the social context-such as the intentions of the information source? We set out to test whether the intentions of information sources affect whether people consider a claim of fact to be true or false even when they have access to the ground truth."
[...] The findings suggest that, even if people have access to the same set of facts, they might disagree about the truth of claims if they attribute discrepant intentions to information sources.
The results demonstrated that people are not merely sensitive to the objective accuracy of claims of fact when classifying them as true or false. While this study focused on the intent of the information source, Young and Handley-Miner say intent is probably not the only other feature people use to evaluate truth.
Journal Reference:
Handley-Miner, I.J., Pope, M., Atkins, R.K. et al. The intentions of information sources can affect what information people think qualifies as true. Sci Rep 13, 7718 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-34806-4
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