Lying Without Saying Something False? A Cross-Cultural Investigation of the Folk Concept of Lying in Russian and English Speakers

The present study examines cross-cultural differences in people’s concept of lying with regard to the question of whether lying requires an agent to say something they believe to be false. While prominent philosophical views maintain that lying entails that a person explicitly expresses a believed-false claim, recent research suggests that people’s concept of lying might also include certain kinds of deception that are communicated more indirectly. An important drawback of previous empirical work on this topic is that only few studies have investigated people’s concept of lying in non-Western samples. In the present study, we compare people’s intuitions about lying with indirect deceptions (i.e., presuppositions, conversational implicatures, and non-verbal actions) in a sample of N = 255 participants from Russia and N = 300 participants from the United Kingdom. Our findings show a strong degree of similarity between lie ratings of participants from Russia and the United Kingdom, with both samples holding it possible for agents to lie with deceptive statements and actions that do not involve the agent saying something they believe to be false.

The Dark Number of Insurance Crimes

Insurance crime makes is difficult to interpret and measure the scale of undisclosed crime. In the insurance industry, the perpetrator can easily craft a false claim by simulating, for example a traffic accident, injury, or property damage. This causes difficulties in the evidential process and measuring the scale of the phenomenon. The aim of the article is to analyse the phenomenon of the dark number of insurance crimes. This paper includes the analysis of the definition of the term ‘dark number’ and other factors, such the degree of market development, the effectiveness of detection, the level of insurance awareness, and the dimension of social consent in Poland and selected European countries. Defeating the problem of insurance crime and estimating the dark number of insurance crimes requires taking into account the specificity of individual markets and types of insurance. We prove that effective measurement and reduction of a dark number of insurance crime is not possible without the constant updating of knowledge about the phenomenon of insurance crime and the use of advanced IT tools.

Debunking Health Misinformation on Social Media: The Challenge of Dynamic Conversations (Preprint)

BACKGROUND The spread of false and misleading health information on social media can cause individual and social harm. Research on debunking has shown that properly designed corrections can mitigate the impact of misinformation, but little is known about the impact of correction in the context of prolonged social media debates. For example, when a social media user takes to Facebook to make a false claim about a health-related practice, and a health expert subsequently refutes the claim, the conversation rarely ends there. Often, the social media user proceeds by rebuking the critic and doubling down on the claim. OBJECTIVE The present research examines the impact of such extended back and forth between false claims and debunking attempts on observers’ dispositions toward behavior that science favors. We test competing predictions about the effect of extended exposure on people’s attitudes and intentions toward masking in public during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and explore several psychological processes potentially underlying this effect. METHODS Five hundred US residents took part in an online experiment in October 2020. They reported on their attitudes and intentions toward wearing masks in public. Then, they were randomly assigned to one of four social media exposure conditions (misinformation only vs. misinformation + correction vs. misinformation + correction + rebuke vs. misinformation + correction + rebuke + second correction) and reported their attitudes and intentions for a second time. They also indicated whether they would consider sharing the thread if they were to see it on social media and answered questions on potential mediators and covariates. RESULTS Exposure to misinformation has a negative impact on attitudes and intentions toward masking. Moreover, initial debunking of a false claim generally improves attitudes and intentions toward masking. However, this improvement is washed out by further exposure to false claims and debunking attempts. The latter result is partially explained by a decrease in the perceived objectivity of truth. That is, extended exposure to false claims and debunking attempts appears to weaken belief that there is an objectively correct answer to how people ought to behave in this situation, which in turn leads to less positive reactions toward masking as the prescribed behavior. CONCLUSIONS Health professionals and science advocates face an underappreciated challenge in attempting to debunk misinformation on social media. While engaging in extended debates with science deniers and other purveyors of bunk appears necessary, more research is needed to address the unintended consequences of such engagement.

The battleground of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on Facebook: Fact checkers vs. misinformation spreaders

Our study examines Facebook posts containing nine prominent COVID-19 vaccine misinformation topics that circulated on the platform between March 1st, 2020 and March 1st, 2021. We first identify misinformation spreaders and fact checkers, further dividing the latter group into those who repeat misinformation to debunk the false claim and those who share correct information without repeating the misinformation. Our analysis shows that, on Facebook, there are almost as many fact checkers as misinformation spreaders. In particular, fact checkers’ posts that repeat the original misinformation received significantly more comments than posts from misinformation spreaders. However, we found that misinformation spreaders were far more likely to take on central positions in the misinformation URL co-sharing network than fact checkers. This demonstrates the remarkable ability of misinformation spreaders to coordinate communication strategies across topics.

SIMPLICIUS ON THE FILLING OF SPACE, IN CAELO 655.9–656.5: A DELIBERATE MISTAKE?

In In cael. 655.9–656.5 Simplicius reports an argument in which an apparent justification is offered for the false claim by Aristotle that ‘pyramids’ (regular tetrahedra) can completely fill space. This argument was analysed by Ian Mueller in an Appendix to his translation of In caelo, and the outline of an alternative has been presented in Myrto Hatzimichali's study of Potamo of Alexandria. In this article I contest Mueller's interpretation, and expand on the one reported by Hatzimichali. I also contest Mueller's claim that a version of his interpretation can be found in the partial commentary by Peter of Auvergne. It is suggested here that the ‘justification’ reported by Simplicius is a deliberate slip in logic, which is accompanied by a carefully constructed cover-up involving some quite tricky geometry. Simplicius makes frequent reference to Alexander of Aphrodisias, but it is argued here that he has been very selective with these citations.

The distinct existences argument revisited

The aim of this paper is to take a fresh look at a discussion about the distinct existences argument that took place between David Armstrong and Frank Jackson more than 50 years ago. I will try to show that Armstrong’s argument can be successfully defended against Jackson’s objections (albeit at the price of certain concessions concerning Armstrong’s view on the meaning of psychological terms as well as his conception of universals). Focusing on two counterexamples that Jackson put forward against Hume’s principle (which is central to Armstrong’s argument), I will argue that they are either compatible with Hume’s principle, or imply a false claim. I will also look at several other considerations that go against Hume’s principle, such as, for example, Kripke’s origin essentialism and counterexamples from aposteriori necessity.

Kant and Russell on Leibniz’ Existential Assertions

Leibniz believed in a God that has the power to create beings and whose existence could be a priori demonstrated. Kant (KrV, A 592-602/B 620-630) objected that similar demonstrations all presuppose the false claim that existence is a real property. Russell (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) added that if existence were a real property Leibniz should have concluded that God does not actually have the power to create anything at all. First, I show that Leibniz’ conception of existence is incompatible with the one that Russell presupposes. Subsequently, I argue that on Leibniz’ conception of existence Russell’s objection is immediately undermined.

WICO Graph: A Labeled Dataset of Twitter Subgraphs based on Conspiracy Theory and 5G-Corona Misinformation Tweets

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, a surge of misinformation has flooded social media and other internet channels, and some of it has the potential to cause real-world harm. To counteract this misinformation, reliably identifying it is a principal problem to be solved. However, the identification of misinformation poses a formidable challenge for language processing systems since the texts containing misinformation are short, work with insinuation rather than explicitly stating a false claim, or resemble other postings that deal with the same topic ironically. Accordingly, for the development of better detection systems, it is not only essential to use hand-labeled ground truth data and extend the analysis with methods beyond Natural Language Processing to consider the characteristics of the participant's relationships and the diffusion of misinformation. This paper presents a novel dataset that deals with a specific piece of misinformation: the idea that the 5G wireless network is causally connected to the COVID-19 pandemic. We have extracted the subgraphs of 3,000 manually classified Tweets from Twitter's follower network and distinguished them into three categories. First, subgraphs of Tweets that propagate the specific 5G misinformation, those that spread other conspiracy theories, and Tweets that do neither. We created the WICO (Wireless Networks and Coronavirus Conspiracy) dataset to support experts in machine learning experts, graph processing, and related fields in studying the spread of misinformation. Furthermore, we provide a series of baseline experiments using both Graph Neural Networks and other established classifiers that use simple graph metrics as features.

Which Cinderella You Want Your Daughter To Be?

Modern age has provided great opportunities in all domains of people's lives, but it has also generated unexpected obstacles; one of which is a negative change in the concept of beauty in society. The new emerging tendency of people to appear like a supermodel in social media and to draw the interest of others by adding beauty filters not only sends an ambiguous message about beauty, but also produces a false claim of appearance where teenagers like to 'fake it.' Beauty has always been the contentious subject in most fictional works and specially in fairy tales. Classic fairy tales portray their heroine as a beautiful being, a picture-perfect substance. They are celebrated not for their confidence or bravery, but for their outward appearance, clothing and jewels. Thus, every girl child has a fantasy of finding a Fairy God Mother who can turn her into a stunning, attractive princess and only then, they can meet their prince charming and happily ever after. But things are not the same, they don’t have God Mother or they don’t want to remain as a beautiful angel, rather, they want to be ordinary with full of courage and confidence to fight back to any evil. They don’t need any prince charming to fight for her rather they want to fight for their own. This paper will study the contrast between the classical and modern story of Cinderella in Children Literature and also explore how the concept of beauty is changing in the modern books and fairy tales.

When forewarned is not forearmed: The paradoxical effect of single warnings attached to repeated fake news

The fight against misinformation on social media and the internet in general has gained tremendous attention in the recent years. One way of combatting this has been to attach warnings tags about verified content. In this paper, we report two studies that examine the potential effects of a single warning tag in a context where the gist of a False claim is often repeated without the tag, which, given the reality of the way that information is transmitted, can be said to be an ecologically realistic model. Study 1 showed that the placement of the tag makes no difference, while a simple tag produces higher levels of belief than a tag with explanatory details. Remarkably, the simple tag produces a large increase in belief in the False claim. Study 2 showed that enhancing the distinctive character of a tag by adding irrelevant information to it produces a relative increase in believability equivalent to that obtained by making the claim graphically more distinctive. However, repeating a simple tag more often reduces this effect. These results indicate that the effects of warning tags are a combination of adding to the distinctiveness of the memory trace of the False claim (which makes this more believable by increasing fluency) and the semantic content of the tag (which reduces belief).