What is the name for this particular kind of ignorance?

July 10, 2020 6:11 AM

Is there a name for people in general being quicker and more willing to accept (and disseminate) contrary information, but slow to accept boring old proven facts? It seems like this happens most often in health subjects.

It seems like this is a kind of general psychology quirk, so I assume there is a name for it. What is the specific name for a a person being more willing to accept outlandish and counterintuitive premises than intuitive and proven knowledge?

For examples, they run from the relatively benign - "Clean eating, lots of sleep, and exercise? NO, this one weird trick is what you really need to be healthy. Strap a potato to your foot!"

... to the deadly: "Vaccines? No sir, those are dangerous, you should inject bleach into your child instead."

posted by FakeFreyja to Writing & Language (9 answers total)

Novelty bias, maybe?
posted by synecdoche at 6:18 AM on July 10, 2020 [2 favorites]

I had an acquaintance you're describing well, who carried it too far with the police on a few occasions. Personal references were submitted for a sentencing and the most apt said he was “contrarian”.
posted by bonobothegreat at 6:26 AM on July 10, 2020 [4 favorites]

I'm not aware of single name for the collection of traits that lead to this behavior, but the list of traits has been studied and enumerated.


"These people tend to be more suspicious, untrusting, eccentric, needing to feel special, with a tendency to regard the world as an inherently dangerous place," Hart said. "They are also more likely to detect meaningful patterns where they might not exist. People who are reluctant to believe in conspiracy theories tend to have the opposite qualities."
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:03 AM on July 10, 2020 [2 favorites]

I mean, it's reductive, but even if it's not the same group exactly I find the Venn diagram for these folks and garden-variety assholes to contain an enormous amount of overlap.
posted by uberchet at 7:41 AM on July 10, 2020 [1 favorite]

Edgelordism?
posted by Gray Duck at 10:57 AM on July 10, 2020 [1 favorite]

Novelty Bias is the only term I've heard for this academically. It's kind of an understudied phenomenon in my opinion, and I believe it would also correlate with believing in Conspiracy Theories. There's also some correlation with the general trait Openness to Experience but that's far more general.
posted by JZig at 11:03 AM on July 10, 2020 [2 favorites]

A big five profile characterized by high neuroticism and low openness to experience. Also, as a point of anecdata, everyone I know who is like this is preoccupied with their own uniqueness. The false sense of uniqueness is a recognized cognitive bias, and these people are seemingly at the far end of the spectrum that contains the garden variety cognitive bias.
posted by unstrungharp at 6:45 PM on July 10, 2020 [1 favorite]

I suspect this is one of those system failures where a bunch of things have to align and go wrong together (there's a term when evaluating complex systems failure where many layers of holey cheese align some holes and the system goes down).

The 'aligned cheese holes' of:
* Swapping uneducated ignorance for 'knowing and controlling' the world
* Swapping central authority for people working out their own explanations of the world
* Overwhelming people with options, like a denial-of-service stopping people from eventually deciding to change their ingrained view
* Keeping people scared of "other" viewpoints
* Holding contradictory viewpoints as a habit -- sometimes called cognitive dissonance, sometimes people are flattered by the idea that they have integrity while holding a bunch of non-matching ideas
* Basic stuff hasn't changed, it's still a solved problem to drink water, eat balanced fruit/vegetable diet, take regular exercise, deal with your emotions, have financial and time/energy budgets

The big hole: "life hacks" trick our inability to assess how hard something new is going to be and we have a trend to over-estimate competence when we don't know much about a topic (the Dunning-Kruger effect), so there's an appealing edge to novel things that promise to be easier than established ways.

My response: how do I come to believe true what I believe to be true? Outcomes. Imagine (or if it's too late and you have to experience) the outcome on the many layers our choices impact this world: the self, home, family & friends, people local but not in our community, the PESTLE layers (political, economical, social, technological, legal, ecological) and ask who gains and loses power.
posted by k3ninho at 2:26 AM on July 11, 2020

There is a phenomenon called negatively biased credulity put forward by biological anthropologists. Basically people are argued to be more attuned to threat-related information, as costs related to disregarding hazards are outsized compared to those incurred by disregarding benefits. It's related to and an extension of general negativity bias, which is negative being more salient than positive, which itself is the basis of loss aversion (losses loom larger than gains in our psychology, we will do more to avoid losses than to achieve gains). This negative credulity bias is, as others have noted, overlapping with conspiracy beliefs, as it's more pronounced in those who find the world to be dangerous, individuals who may constitute important nodes in cultural transmission networks.

Super cool paper on this in an open access journal:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0095167
posted by butterbean at 6:05 PM on July 15, 2020