This article is the first in a series from the Post-Truth Initiative, a Strategic Research Excellence Initiative at the University of Sydney. The series examines today’s post-truth problem in public discourse: the thriving economy of lies, bullshit and propaganda that threatens rational discourse and policy. The...
Gordon Pennycook, James Allan Cheyne, Nathaniel Barr, Derek J. Koehler, Jonathan A. Fugelsang Although bullshit is common in everyday life and has attracted attention from philosophers, its reception (critical or ingenuous) has not, to our knowledge, been subject to empirical investigation. Here we focus on pseudo-profound...
March 13, 2015, at 1:02 pm I don’t know if this could really be called “new”, but it’s a form of anti-intellectualism that usually goes unnoticed. I find it particularly frustrating because I so often see it often among people who claim to respect knowledge, education,...
Dr Adam McNamara, School of Memetics; University of Gyvaphuk (UK) Abstract: Propaganda is traditionally considered the use of emotionally provocative imagery to distort facts to a relatively wide target audience such as a nation. Today one sees propaganda in the workplace and notably it comes in the...
August 26, 2015, at 1:44 pm Note: This post also appears on Insight, the official blog of the Skeptic Society. A few months ago I wrote about the psychology of vaccine denial. In the post I discussed two publications, one of which (Nyhan, et al.) found: Corrective information...