Spot the contradiction: What drives proneness to doublethink

Abstract

There is growing evidence that, somewhat counterintuitively, people relatively easily accommodate inconsistent beliefs in their belief system - for example, they might passionately argue for and against obligatory voting. There are, however, individual differences in this tendency which we labeled doublethink. We previously demonstrated its convergent validity – doublethink was positively related to intuitive thinking style, but negatively to rational thinking style and need for cognition. In this study we further explored whether doublethink can be predicted by two metacognitive abilities - (a) to discern semantically valid but actually vacuous from meaningful statements (i.e. receptivity to pseudo-profound bullshit) and (b) to spot inconsistencies in presented content. To assess the latter, we created a made-up video advert in which we embedded five pairs of contradictory information; participants’ task was to list all contradictions they spotted upon viewing it. Participants (N =233) endorsed an average of 3.5 out of 11 pairs of contradictory beliefs in Doublethink scale, and spotted an average of 1.6 out of five contradictory pairs of statements in the advert. The model was significant, and both measures contributed significantly to prediction in expected manner (bullshit receptivity positively; ability to spot contradictions negatively), the latter contributing even after first accounting for the effect of bullshit receptivity. In the future, to get more insight into the nature of the construct of doublethink - whether it should be conceptualized as a high entropy thinking style or as a lack of ability to spot inconsistencies - the two sets of predictors should be compared in a single design.