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Full-Text Articles in Psychology
Person-Level Sources Of Continued Influence Effect: The Roles Of Attention Control, Intolerance Of Ambiguity And Conservatism, Jinhao Chi
Dissertations
People continually rely on disinformation to make judgments after it is corrected or discredited. This phenomenon is termed the continued influence effect (CIE). Using a sample of 152 participants, the current study examined whether the CIE can be explained by a person’s political orientation, attention control (AC) levels, intolerance of ambiguity (IA) and need for specific closure (NSC). It was found that when political orientation was based on self-reports, the overall political conservatism did not predict the CIE (r = .13, p = .09) but economic conservatism did (r = .19, p < .05), suggesting that those with higher self-reported fiscally conservative attitudes may show more prolonged influence of disinformation. In addition, the overall AC levels did not predict the CIE (r = .08, p = .30), but the antisaccade scores reflecting the ability to inhibit automatic responses were a significant positive predictor of the CIE (r = .18, p < .05). Lastly, neither IA nor NSC significantly predicted the CIE (ps > .05). These findings were obtained with only one …
The Trojan Horse In Your Head: Cognitive Threats And How To Counter Them, Lora Pitman
The Trojan Horse In Your Head: Cognitive Threats And How To Counter Them, Lora Pitman
Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations
Vulnerabilities of the human mind caused by the way it is designed to process information have always been exploited in warfare, since the dawn of humanity. History is marked with frequent use of deceits and manipulations over the centuries, with examples ranging from the use of the Trojan Horse to Facebook’s user-profiling. While largely used over time, these tactics, that I call cognitive threats, have not been collectively examined. I hypothesize that they pose a security issue to which prevention strategies on different levels could be successfully applied. The research questions that this study asks are what the characteristics of …