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 and rigidity. Indifference manifests itself in a lack of motivation to find the truth. Rigidity manifests itself in being insensitive to evidence. We develop a scale to measure epistemic vice with the subscales indifference and rigidity. The Epistemic Vice Scale is internally consistent; has good convergent, divergent, and discriminant validity; and is strongly associated with the endorsement of misinformation and conspiracy theories. Epistemic vice explains additional variance in the endorsement of misinformation and conspiracy theories over and above demographic and related psychological concepts and shows medium to large effect sizes across outcome measures. We demonstrate that epistemic vice differs from existing psychological constructs, and show that the scale can explain individual differences in dealing with misinformation and conspiracy theories. We conclude that epistemic vice might contribute to “postfactive” ways of thinking.

本文介绍了两项关于认知恶习十项量表的开发和验证以及认知恶习与错误信息和假新闻之间关系的研究。认知缺陷被定义为干扰获取、维持和传播知识的性格特征。认知缺陷的例子是轻信和对知识漠不关心。据推测，认知上邪恶的人特别容易受到错误信息和阴谋论的影响。我们对居住在美国的 Amazon Mechanical Turk 进行了一项探索性和一项验证性观察性调查研究（总计N = 1737）。我们表明，我们研究的一系列认知恶习背后有两种心理特征：对真理的冷漠和僵化。冷漠表现为缺乏寻找真相的动力。僵化表现为对证据不敏感。我们开发了一个量表来衡量认知缺陷，其子量表为冷漠和僵化。认知副量表内部是一致的；具有良好的收敛效度、发散效度和判别效度；并且与错误信息和阴谋论的认可密切相关。认知缺陷解释了除人口和相关心理概念之外对错误信息和阴谋论的认可的额外差异，并显示了结果测量中的中等到大的影响大小。我们证明了认知恶习不同于现有的心理结构，并表明该量表可以解释处理错误信息和阴谋论时的个体差异。我们的结论是，认知缺陷可能有助于“事后”思维方式。