A combination of personality characteristics such as reliance on self-intuition, belief in conspiracy theories, "need for chaos" and lack of intellectual modesty, alongside an unusual state of persistent social mistrust, leads to people simultaneously rejecting any existing, established and reliable information and adopting new, completely unfounded information , just because it is an alternative
An experiment conducted by Dr. Ruth Mayo and PhD student Deborah Newman from the Hebrew University, in collaboration with Professor Steven Lewandowski from the University of Bristol in England and published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences constitutes the first empirical basis for characterizing a paradox in People accept new information, no matter how far-fetched, and reject any existing information, no matter how well-founded and reliable it is.
The researchers hypothesized that the paradox is related to mistrust, so they measured it among a group known to have a high level of mistrust - the opponents of the corona vaccine in the USA while comparing it to participants who support the vaccine. About 400 Americans aged 18-40, about half of whom support the corona vaccines and about half of whom oppose it, were invited to participate in the experiment. The participants' attitude towards the vaccines was measured several weeks in advance, so they were not aware that there was a reason for inviting them to the experiment. In the experiment, the participants were presented with ten sentences unrelated to existing beliefs or attitudes. Half of them described correct, agreed and accepted facts on general issues that do not arouse controversy and the rest of the sentences were invented by the researchers and described "alternative facts" to agreed facts, which do not offer any explanation or motivation for their acceptance. The participants were asked to rate each sentence on a scale ranging from "true" (numerical score of 6) to "false" (numerical score of 1). After that, they filled out additional questionnaires that measured traits found in previous studies to be related to belief in alternative information - reliance on intuition, distrust, belief in conspiracy theories, "need for chaos" and "intellectual modesty".
The study shows that among the group of vaccine opponents the gap between the truth rating of facts and the truth rating of "alternative facts" was smaller (2.71) compared to that among vaccine supporters (3.27). Specifically, vaccine opponents believed more in the "alternative facts" (2.44) compared to vaccine supporters (1.98) and believed less in facts (5.13 among vaccine opponents compared to 5.26 among vaccine supporters). The groups also differed in that vaccine opponents relied more on their intuition, demonstrated a higher level of general distrust and higher belief in conspiracy theories relative to vaccine supporters. Vaccinationists also had a greater need for chaos and demonstrated less intellectual modesty.
According to the researchers Mayo and Newman, "Our hypothesis is that the combination of mistrust, giving more weight to personal intuition and low intellectual modesty, leads to a paradoxical way of thinking in which, on the one hand, they do not believe existing, established and reliable information, and on the other hand, they tend to believe any new and absurd information, the whole essence of which is its being An alternative to the existing information.' They also add that "the blurring of the boundaries between truth and lies harms the perception of the common reality of all of us".
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