Dosledno nedosledni: priroda i prediktivnost konstrukta duplog mišljenja
Year: 2025
Type: dissertation
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: If a person tends to endorse conflicting beliefs simultaneously, we say they are prone to doublethink. While psychological research, normative logic and our implicit expectations of rationality suggest that people are uncomfortable with inconsistency, we find stable individual differences in the tendency to endorse contradictory beliefs. In this research, we focused on (1) exploring whether doublethink can be predictive of irrational beliefs and their consequences, and (2) understanding the nature of what this tendency is. In a study (N = 306) exploring the relation of doublethink and all three groups of irrational beliefs - paranormal, pseudoscientific and conspiratorial - we find that doublethink is positively related to all three. Moreover, since the pandemic provided a unique opportunity to explore the endorsement of contradictory conspiracy theories as they were emerging, we found, across three studies (total N = 741) that doublethink had a unique contribution to the prediction of COVID-19 conspiracy theories, over and above other markers of superficial information processing style. We also showed in a separate study (N = 385) examining doublethink’s ties to non-adherence to medical advice and use of alternative medicine that it was related to neither. We did however find that, while unrelated to trust in science, doublethink was positively correlated with trust in folk wisdom or the “wisdom of the common man”. As for our second aim, across different studies, we found doublethink to be robustly related to markers of a more superficial approach to information processing, including intuitive thinking style, pseudo-profound bullshit receptivity, and need for closure, while inversely related to actively open-minded thinking, cognitive reflection, and syllogistic reasoning. While doublethink showed no significant relation to executive functions like shifting and updating after accounting for other superficial style variables, we did find it to be related to the more specific ability of spotting inconsistencies, across two studies (N = 234; N = 315), suggesting an overall lack of sensitivity to contradictions. This is what we focused on in three separate experimental studies (total N = 1071) - addressing this lack of sensitivity to contradictions through increasingly direct strategies to tackle inconsistent beliefs. Our interventions did not, however, reduce doublethink. To gain insight as to why the experimental studies yielded no results, we conducted semi-structured interviews with participants (N = 15) to explore how they reason about their inconsistent beliefs, and found the participants to be aware that their beliefs are contradictory yet also to not attach any negative value to that state of affairs. Instead, they relied on rationalizing the contradictions through various strategies. Overall, we find that doublethink is, paradoxically, a permissive, yet rigid thinking style, that helps allow different beliefs to enter the system without much filter and cross-referencing, but then also rarely includes belief revision and updating within the belief system itself. Our findings challenge the notion of consistency as a core motive, and instead suggest tolerance of belief contradictions as at times adaptive thinking style, but one that is also a key mechanism for maintaining epistemic vulnerability to irrational beliefs and their persistent existence.
Author: Petrović, Marija
Language: Serbian
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7112222243