Illusion Of Knowledge Research Articles

Informing Immersed Citizens: The Impact of Interactivity on Comprehending News in Immersive Journalism

Immersive journalism has emerged as an innovative journalistic approach promising enhanced attention and understanding through interactive, virtual environments. Previously, this was mostly tested through factual knowledge. However, evaluating immersive audio-visual modalities solely along factual knowledge falls short of considering, firstly, what about and how an immersive experience is remembered and, secondly, the importance of considering the perceptions surrounding information acquisition. Therefore, this study examines how interactivity in immersive journalism affects traditional as well as novel ways of comprehending news, such as episodic memory. In addition, we consider perceptions related to knowledge. We draw on a laboratory experiment (<em>N</em> = 149) testing the effect of three levels of interactivity provided (no interactivity vs. looking around vs. looking around + control over pace and order of storyline). Results indicate that a higher range of interactivity does not influence factual memory, but leads to an increase in perceived knowledge, thus indicating an illusion of knowledge. Moreover, there is a tendency to formulate more subjective takeaways in the high-interactivity condition, while interactivity did not influence the credibility evaluations. This provides partial empirical support for the credibility paradox of immersive journalism.

Limits of functional illiteracy in explaining human misinformation: the knowledge illusion, values, and the dual process theory of thought.

Limits of functional illiteracy in explaining human misinformation: the knowledge illusion, values, and the dual process theory of thought.

A Bibliographic Review of Illusion of Knowledge in the Financial Field

People tend to believe that more information will improve the accuracy of predicting outcomes in highly uncertain situations. This behaviour, known as ‘illusion of knowledge,’ is related to overconfidence in multiple areas of study, and attracts scientific attention. The aim of this research is to determine the academic evolution of the illusion of knowledge within the financial field. For this purpose, two different methodologies have been used to generate a more solid contribution. The first part is based on the ReSiste-CSH bibliographic framework raised for the study of social sciences, and the second part uses the Bibliometrix software to measure the performance of the subject over time. The Web of Science academic database was used as a reference source for the period 1987–2021, resulting in a sample of 1,202 papers in highly impactful academic journals. The results show a positive evolution over time in the number of publications, as well as a geographical concentration in journals of the Q1 category from the United States and the United Kingdom, together with a close relationship with areas of study such as psychology, business and economics, among others. JEL Code: G41

Puncturing the Knowledge Illusion Does Not Reduce Policy and Political Extremism: Evidence From a Replication and Extension

AbstractUnderstanding the formation of and changes in citizens' extreme views on complex public policies is an important task in our increasingly polarized world. Behavioral sciences offer insights on cognitive processes and potential mechanisms to mitigate extremity in policy preferences and develop more realistic models that underprint political attitudes. About a decade ago, Fernbach et al. (2013) offered a simple cognitive intervention to reduce political extremism: Confront people with their lack of procedural policy knowledge such that their overestimation of knowledge is shattered. We conducted three high‐value replications and extensions to examine the applicability of Fernbach's proposed theory among a sample of 5,139 citizens in postconflict Hong Kong. Our results suggest the opposite: Positional extremity is higher when citizens articulate their understanding of policy. Our study, which is larger in scale, draws on different time periods and extended interventions and examines more controversial policy issues has epistemological and cognitive implications for future research on the political psychology of extremism.

Illusion of knowledge: is the Dunning-Kruger effect in political sophistication more widespread than before?

ABSTRACT The dramatic expansion of social and digital media during the past fifteen years has fundamentally transformed the media landscape in Western democracies. Nevertheless, we still know little about the impact it has had on aggregate levels of political sophistication. Previous research has suggested that increased information availability may result in inflated self-perceptions of (political) sophistication. Based on the Dunning-Kruger effect, it is plausible to think that low-sophistication individuals are particularly vulnerable for overconfidence in political sophistication. Using a repeated-measures cross-sectional survey data with samples representative of the Finnish voting-age population, this study analyzes the prevalence of the Dunning-Kruger effect in 2008 and 2020, before and after social media revolutionized the political information landscape. Although the Dunning-Kruger effect is more widespread in 2020 than in 2008, the increase is not statistically significant at the individual-level. However, the findings suggest that at the individual-level, overconfidence is linked to relying on internet and social media for political news, but not to relying on traditional media. This aligns with recent research showing that social media contributes at best minimally to political learning. Instead, it seems to amplify overconfidence, especially among the least knowledgeable segment of the population.

Illusion of knowledge in statistics among clinicians: evaluating the alignment between objective accuracy and subjective confidence, an online survey

Healthcare professionals’ statistical illiteracy can impair medical decision quality and compromise patient safety. Previous studies have documented clinicians’ insufficient proficiency in statistics and a tendency in overconfidence. However, an underexplored aspect is clinicians’ awareness of their lack of statistical knowledge that precludes any corrective intervention attempt. Here, we investigated physicians’, residents’ and medical students’ alignment between subjective confidence judgments and objective accuracy in basic medical statistics. We also examined how gender, profile of experience and practice of research activity affect this alignment, and the influence of problem framing (conditional probabilities, CP vs. natural frequencies, NF). Eight hundred ninety-eight clinicians completed an online survey assessing skill and confidence on three topics: vaccine efficacy, p value and diagnostic test results interpretation. Results evidenced an overall consistent poor proficiency in statistics often combined with high confidence, even in incorrect answers. We also demonstrate that despite overconfidence bias, clinicians show a degree of metacognitive sensitivity, as their confidence judgments discriminate between their correct and incorrect answers. Finally, we confirm the positive impact of the more intuitive NF framing on accuracy. Together, our results pave the way for the development of teaching recommendations and pedagogical interventions such as promoting metacognition on basic knowledge and statistical reasoning as well as the use of NF to tackle statistical illiteracy in the medical context.

Special Report: Autism Spectrum Disorder and Inflexible Thinking—Affecting Patients Across the Lifespan

Special Report: Autism Spectrum Disorder and Inflexible Thinking—Affecting Patients Across the Lifespan

Lose Your Father

Lose Your Father

Fake News: Mass Knowledge Illusion Under Pleasure Marketing

Fake news refers to deliberately fake news. It is not only a practical problem that puzzles the information audience, but also a blind spot and misunderstanding of the public's participation in current affairs. It also brings endless troubles to news work of social life. Therefore, it constitutes a problem that is widely concerned by the communication, journalism and cultural industry circles. This paper will profundly analyze the generation, essence and function of fake news, a knowledge illusion, from the perspective of the audience's consumption psychology, and on this basis, think about the psychological path for audience to penetrate the fake news knowledge illusion, hoping to solve the difficult problem of perplexing social life and social order through cultivation of the audience's own news literacy.The essence of fake news is that it provides knowledge illusion for the audience by pleasure marketing,which is somewhat like the true news. The knowledge illusion is materialization for audience’s “omniscience” desire by “peseudo-objective” symbolic system, to realize the producer’s utilitarian intention in political, economic and cultural aspects. To penetrate the knowledge illusion of false news, the audience should first be aware of the contradictions within the organizational structure of the false news knowledge illusion, then be soberly aware of the illusory nature of the illusion and self desire, and avoid objectifying self desire, so as to discover the gap between the news symbols and the intention of the false news producers and penetrate the false news knowledge illusion. When the audience really realizes the penetration of the false news knowledge illusion, he not only returns to the normal social transmission order, but also helps the public media to establish a healthy transmission ethics in social public space.

The illusion of knowledge in the emerging field of psychedelic research

While the field of psychedelic research is continuously expanding and offers new hope for achieving successful treatments for physical and mental disorders, certain methodological aspects require improvement. Some of the flaws are shared with clinical trials for other kinds of drugs and others are specific to the field. Given that psychedelic research is an emerging field, it is important to address these problems in a timely manner. In this manuscript, we present the main methodological issues in psychedelic research, ranging from the most manageable (e.g., non-representative samples) to the most complex (e.g., limitations of the biomedical model). In addition, given its relevance, we dedicate a section of the manuscript to a discussion of ethical concerns around psychedelic research.

Secrecies as Organized Ignorance: The Illusion of Knowledge in French Pesticide Regulation

ABSTRACT Taking an organizational sociology approach, the study of French pesticide regulation highlights the role of the unexpected effects of secrecies in organized ignorance. It demonstrates that the main regulator, the French food safety agency (ANSES), as well as the users of pesticides, the farmers, develop their own subcultures of secrecy to conceal information about their real practices. These subcultures support each other tacitly: the opacity created by farmers around their practices stifle knowledge production and reporting on their exposure to pesticides. Consequently, the risk standards are never called into question, which ensures that the French food safety agency maintains its scientific reputation. In turn, the fact that official standardization of risk is never challenged, impedes the reinforcement of pesticide regulations that would otherwise hamper day-to-day crop management. This tacit agreement between these combined subcultures maintains the illusion that the regulatory science used for risk management could control a broad spectrum of hazards, when in fact it has only a limited or even outdated knowledge of them. This deepens the definitions of organized ignorance. It demonstrates that non-knowledge production results not only from the complex mix of political, scientific and regulatory frameworks surrounding official expertise as STS researches tend to show, but also from more widespread and less perceptible sociological mechanism such as tacit understanding. Unexpected effects of intentional actions also count as much as willful actions in strategic ignorance production.

The Most Common Behavioural Biases among Young Adults in Bristol, UK and Istanbul

According to traditional finance theories, individuals behave rationally and take financial decisions under this rationality. Contrary to traditional finance theories, behavioural finance states that individuals do not always act rationally because they are affected by emotions and feelings. Thus, behavioural finance can be defined as systematic errors that keep individuals away from rationality. The biases might cause unhelpful or even hurtful decisions. Therefore, a high level of behavioural biases might negatively affect the financial well-being of individuals. It is vital to investigate young adults’ financial behaviours as the future of the economies are influenced by their decisions. In this research, behavioural biases among young adults in Bristol, UK and Istanbul, Turkey, was examined to prevent young adults from making irrational financial decisions by identifying the most common behavioural biases. Thus, economies might be robust than today. According to result of this research, young adults have different behavioural biases depending on their culture. The most common biases among young adults in Bristol are over-optimism, anchoring, categorisation, conservatism, and the illusion of control while they are framing, cognitive dissonance, the illusion of knowledge and cue competition among young adults in Istanbul. These common behavioural biases that young adults in Bristol and Istanbul have to lead to many irrational financial decisions. It is not possible to reduce these behavioural biases by direct intervention, and for this, individuals need to be educated. Families may educate young adults about behavioural biases. After that rest of the education about behavioural biases may be given in the schools. Lastly, individuals should be informed about their behavioural biases and possible effects of these biases on their financial well-being.

Gaining insight through explaining? How generating explanations affects individuals’ perceptions of their own and of experts’ knowledge

ABSTRACT When individuals in our knowledge society assess the extent of their own knowledge, they may overestimate what they actually know. But, this knowledge illusion can be reduced when people are prompted to explain the content. To investigate whether this holds true for written self-explanations about science phenomena this study transfers the Illusion of explanatory depth (IOED) paradigm to learning from a written science-related text. In an experimental group design, individuals (N = 155) first read information on artificial intelligence supported weather forecasting and then either did or did not produce a written explanation on the topic. Afterwards they rated their own knowledge on the topic, rated experts’ knowledge on the topic, answered questions on their strategies for handling scientific information and rated their own topic specific intellectual humility. Results show that participants in all experimental conditions rated their own knowledge significantly lower than that of experts; however, providing the written explanation about predicting severe weather events did not significantly affect the dependent measures. Implications address how giving explanations may influence judgements of one’s own and scientists’ knowledge in the context of reading science-related texts.

Actual and Perceived Knowledge About COVID-19: The Role of Information Behavior in Media

The COVID-19 pandemic poses a health threat that has dominated media coverage. However, not much is known about individual media use to acquire knowledge about COVID-19. To address this open research question, this study investigated how the perceived threat is linked to media use and how media use is associated with perceived and actual knowledge about COVID-19. In a German online survey conducted between April 16 and April 27, 2020, N = 952 participants provided information on their perceived threat and media use to inform themselves about COVID-19. In this process, they indicated how well they were informed about COVID-19 (perceived knowledge) and subsequently completed a COVID-19 knowledge test (actual knowledge). Results indicated that individuals who felt more threatened by COVID-19 used media more often to inform themselves (b = 0.20, p < 0.001) but focused on fewer different media channels (b = 0.01, p < 0.001). Further, frequent media use was associated with higher perceived knowledge (b = 0.47, p < 0.001), but not with higher actual knowledge about COVID-19 (b = −0.01, p = 0.938), reflecting an illusion of knowledge. Additionally, using fewer media channels was linked to higher perceived (b = 2.21, p < 0.001) and actual knowledge (b = 2.08, p = 0.008). Finally, explorative analyses on the use of different media channels revealed that an illusion of knowledge emerged for using social media, public television, and newspapers. Potential explanations for the findings and implications for future research are discussed.

Who knows what? Knowledge misattribution in the division of cognitive labor.

As technology advances, people increasingly outsource cognitive tasks and can more easily access others' knowledge. While externalized aids often support human abilities, they may also make it more difficult for people to assess their own competence. Indeed, using online search engines leads people to treat searchable information as if they already know it (Fisher et al., Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2015, 144, 674). Six primary and two supplemental studies (N = 3,262) extend previous research by exploring how illusions of knowledge result from reliance on other agents. After teaming with knowledgeable partners (artificially intelligent agents or human teammates) on a trivia quiz, people overestimated how well they would perform on future quizzes for which help was not available; this bias was not evident for participants who never received help. Moreover, overconfidence was insensitive to whether assistance was provided on hard versus easy problems, or even whether the assistance was accurate. Receiving outside assistance creates an ambiguity regarding who deserves credit for success or blame for failure. When this ambiguity is removed, people become better calibrated. These results indicate that reliance on technology and outside knowledge may change our view of ourselves-convincing us we are more capable than we really are. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Trading practice and Behavioral Biases of Individual Investors in Nepalese Stock Market

The paper was based on survey research design. There is significant association between experience group with herding bias and optimism bias and there is no significant association between experience group with investment decision bias, disposition effect bias, and overconfidence bias. Similarly there is significant association between trading frequency with herding bias, optimism bias, investment decision bias, disposition effect bias, and overconfidence bias. Heuristics may make investors overconfident as they overlook risks causing security price to move away from fundamentals. Investors tend to be overconfident and hence overestimate the accuracy of their forecast due to illusion of knowledge and illusion of control.

Exploring the roles of analytic cognitive style, climate science literacy, illusion of knowledge, and political orientation in climate change skepticism

The issue of climate change has become central in recent years as alarming data accumulate. It nevertheless has its critics, consisting of people denying climate change or minimizing the responsibility of human beings in the process. This skepticism partly derives from the complexity of the topic, encouraging people to rely on cognitive shortcuts to grasp the phenomenon. We question the role of analytic cognitive style, general and climate change-related knowledge, overconfidence, and political partisanship (plus additional expected confounding variables) in this process through a package of three studies (total N = 1031). In a first study, we showed that an intuitive mindset predicted greater skepticism relative to an analytical mindset while controlling for cognitive ability and the degree to which individuals value science, suggesting that reasoning cognitive style and trust are key parameters of climate change skepticism. A second study highlighted that climate science knowledge stands as strong and independent predictors of skepticism relative to analytic cognitive style. A final study revealed that analytic cognitive style and climate change knowledge generated less influence on climate change skepticism among conservatives than among liberals and moderates, suggesting that reliance on deliberative thinking and knowledgeability on climate science are not sufficient to mitigate climate change skepticism among conservatives. We discuss the critical interplay between cognitive processes and political partisanship in this ongoing debate.

The analysis of living systems can generate both knowledge and illusions.

Life relies on phenomena that range from changes in molecules that occur within nanoseconds to changes in populations that occur over millions of years. Researchers have developed a vast range of experimental techniques to analyze living systems, but a given technique usually only works over a limited range of length or time scales. Therefore, gaining a full understanding of a living system usually requires the integration of information obtained at multiple different scales by two or more techniques. This approach has undoubtedly led to a much better understanding of living systems but, equally, the staggering complexity of these systems, the sophistication and limitations of the techniques available in modern biology, and the need to use two or more techniques, can lead to persistent illusions of knowledge. Here, in an effort to make better use of the experimental techniques we have at our disposal, I propose a broad classification of techniques into six complementary approaches: perturbation, visualization, substitution, characterization, reconstitution, and simulation. Such a taxonomy might also help increase the reproducibility of inferences and improve peer review.

Rail factor and realism of the unconscious

The paper reviews the spoken but unknown behavioral ‘rail factor’ that may bias travel forecasts toward rail, or favor investments in urban rail, foster economic development, or add to satisfaction of travel. An examination of the rail factor hypothesis is timely because of the many high-speed rail (HSR) ‘bullet train’ projects implemented and planned, especially in Europe. Many railway passenger services have negative net benefits and require taxpayer subsidies, and the HSR projects have experienced substantial cost overruns. In this paper the hidden and unspoken rail factor hypothesis is examined from cognitive and unconscious points of view. The former is based on the mode specific constants in mode choice models, types of travel time data, values of travel time reductions, and citizen preferences in two urban transport corridors. The unconscious view is based on Freud's conception of the unconscious, on ‘knowledge illusion’ and perceptions about rail travel. It is pointed out that the cognitive factors already broach the unconscious and its dynamics. The cognitive views and realism of the unconscious are brought together via a literature review of the most typical genres on rail factor research.The findings indicate that a behavioral ‘rail factor’ may exist in planning and derives from the pleasure principle, while the revealed preferences in models, based on the reality principle, and the built projects contraindicate the presence of a ‘rail factor’. The paper calls for perceptive public participation processes, for a greater scope of issues in planning transport projects to help reinforce the reality principle, and for explicit recognition of the unconscious (motives) in transport infrastructure and service decisions.

Features of the educational process as factors of illusion of knowledge in students

The phenomenon of the illusion of knowledge as a mistake of metacognitive monitoring is considered in the article. The factors of illusion of knowledge that arise in the learning process (use of schemes and presentations, teacher feedback, group interaction, repetition of material, problematization of experience, type of test question, presence or absence of assessment situation) are analyzed. In the process of psychological and pedagogical experiment, the factors that increase the probability of the illusion of knowledge in the educational process of students have been identified