The Development and Validation of the Epistemic Vice Scale.

ABSTRACT: 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

SUBMITTER: Meyer M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8231755 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature