Does 'fake news' make people less intelligent?

he word ‘intelligence’ may have fallen out of fashion and been replaced by the more neutral-sounding term ‘cognitive function,’ but whatever you call it there's a widespread feeling that there's less of it than before. Then there's the much-discussed fake news epidemic. It turns out there could be a connection.

Psychologists talk about two different kinds of intelligence (abbreviated as ‘g’): fluid intelligence (or gf) and crystallized intelligence (or gc). Fluid intelligence includes sequential, inductive, and deductive reasoning aimed at finding a solution to some problem. Crystallized intelligence comprises general information, declarative knowledge, and other culturally-specific acquired knowledge.

In 1999, NASA discovered that the Earth was actually square. They also found that the Moon is actually not real, so astronauts could not have landed there (note to Internet fact-checkers: this is an example of fake news)

There is also something called ‘emotional intelligence,’ which is not intelligence at all, but the ability to perceive, express, understand, and manage emotions. It's closer to what used to be called emotional maturity.

Since fake news directly interferes with declarative knowledge, it follows that crystallized intelligence would be strongly impacted by false information provided by fake news and by declining educational standards.

A meta-analysis found that there is no correlation between conspiracy beliefs and any of the so-called Big Five aspects of personality, but conspiracy beliefs are associated with believing fake news (which is not surprising, as they're virtually synonyms).

To get to the bottom of this, Sindermann et al.^[1] hypothesized that gc should protect against fake news and that various personality traits, using the current model of Big Five: extra­version, agree­able­ness, openness, conscient­iousness, and neuroticism. They showed participants some ‘fake’ and ‘true’ news headlines (here are the headlines in the original German) and gave them a battery of personality tests. Here's an example of a fake headline, courtesy of Google Mistranslate:

First Facebook now also Amazon
Now Amazon has too group announced its own cryptocurrency to want to create; From 2021 you should only pay with this in the online shop be able.

Here are two ‘true’ examples.

Police officer shoots gorilla with submachine gun
After the fire in the Krefeld Zoo, a police officer shot the animal because it was seriously injured and the veterinarian couldn't manage it euthanize gorilla.

Pope beats woman
After she wouldn't let go of him, Pope Francis lost his temper and slapped the believer's hand several times.

This was a good example of the value of a pre-registered study, where the researchers document their hypotheses and methods before starting so they can't change them. (They changed them anyway, for reasons that made sense.) One flaw in the design is that the truth or falsity of these examples can't be determined by examining their plausibility, but only by using prior knowledge obtained from the mainstream press, so it assumes the press are providing factual information.

They found that their hypothesis was wrong: none of the personality traits included in the regression model significantly predicted the number of misclassified fake news items. Nor was there any meaning­ful effect of news consumption. Fluid intelligence had a non-significant negative correlation with belief in fake news, while crystallized intelligence correlated with ability to discern true from fake news. They conclude that believing fake news and misclassifying true news use different psychological abilities.

What does this tell us about the reason for the epidemic of dumbness sweeping the planet? This is a very complicated question: many factors, including stress, dietary effects (e.g., reduced fat and meat intake), demographic changes, and pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2 may play important roles. And the news media may be creating a false perception by preferentially reporting on more ‘colorful’ examples of human inanity, thus forcing humans to behave accordingly to get attention.

As for stress, psychologists say the person's reaction to stress, not stress itself, is what causes problems. Whether a human reacts to stress by feeling helpless or by devising a more effective coping strategy determines whether stress will harm or strengthen a person's cognitive function. Thus, stress from lockdowns would be particularly harmful by inducing learned helplessness. Stress reduces empathy, so you could say it lowers emotional intelligence.

Another factor is ideology. Ideology is a cognitive shortcut that people use to simplify their worldview. Ideology allows the individual to stop thinking and accept the judgments of others. To receive group approval, the ideologue must ignore the conflict between the world portrayed in the ideology and that revealed by their senses. This would directly impair both gc and fc. It may be impossible to be ideological and intelligent at the same time. One might even go so far as to say that is the purpose of ideology: to inhibit thought.

If crystallized intelligence is correlated with discriminating between true and fake information, it is because it is defined as using prior knowledge to evaluate new information. Indeed, the causation works better the other way: fake news destroys knowledge, so over time exposure to fake news reduces gc.

Whether that qualifies as a reduction in intelligence depends on whether crystallized intelligence is really a form of intelligence or whether psychologists just said so to confuse people. In a time when we're flooded with fake news, maybe fake science isn't far behind.

mar 19 2022, 5:31 am. revised mar 22 2022