#psychologystudy — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #psychologystudy, aggregated by home.social.
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DATE: July 17, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: New psychology research reveals the insidious nature of bullshit
URL: https://www.psypost.org/new-psychology-research-reveals-the-insidious-nature-of-bullshit/
A recent study published in Current Psychology suggests that people are more likely to believe false information when it comes from someone who ignores the truth rather than a liar who actively tries to deceive. The research indicates that repeating statements made by someone indifferent to facts heavily increases how truthful those statements feel to readers. These findings provide evidence that casual disregard for reality poses a uniquely potent threat to public knowledge and belief.
The digital age makes tracking misinformation increasingly difficult. Information often spreads not just through intentional deception, but through a behavior known in psychology as bullshitting. In academic terms, a liar is someone who knows the truth and intentionally tries to mislead an audience. A bullshitter, on the other hand, communicates with little to no regard for the truth, evidence, or established facts.
A statement made by a bullshitter might happen to be true, or it might be false. The defining characteristic is the speaker’s total indifference to reality. Because bullshitters do not actively try to hide a specific truth, people often judge them less harshly than they judge outright liars.
John V. Petrocelli, a psychology professor at Wake Forest University and author of the book The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit, wanted to test the real-world impact of this behavior. He noted that philosopher Harry Frankfurt proposed the insidious bullshit hypothesis in 1986. This idea suggests that society’s tolerance for bullshitting actually creates more long-term harm to public knowledge than lying.
Past research supports this distinction. In a 2023 study, Petrocelli and his colleagues explored how untrustworthy sources influence consumer attitudes over time. Participants read an advertisement for a fictitious gluten-free pizza and then learned the advertiser was either a known liar or a known bullshitter.
After a two-week delay, participants who had been warned about the bullshitter reported more positive attitudes toward the pizza than those warned about the liar. This demonstrated a “sleeper effect,” where the deceptive influence of the bullshitter actually grew stronger over time. The researchers also found that people possess a higher “dismissal readiness” for lies, meaning they find it easier to entirely reject a known lie than a statement of bullshit.
“We’d already found that people evaluate bullshitting less harshly than lying, consistent with Frankfurt’s (1986) essay,” Petrocelli explained. “But the harder question Frankfurt raised, and one almost nobody had tested empirically, was whether bullshit actually does more damage to what people believe, precisely because it doesn’t trigger the same skepticism a known lie does.”
To test this idea further, researchers examined how bullshitting interacts with the illusory truth effect. The illusory truth effect is a psychological phenomenon where people tend to believe false information is correct simply after hearing it multiple times. When the human brain encounters a repeated statement, it processes that information more easily, and people often mistake this mental ease for actual truth.
Scientists wanted to see if knowing the source of a claim changes this effect. “The illusory truth effect literature gave me a clean, well-validated paradigm to test that consequence directly, rather than just people’s attitudes about bullshitting,” Petrocelli said. If a person knows a statement comes from a bullshitter rather than a liar, they might not filter the repeated information as strictly.
To investigate these dynamics, the authors designed a series of three experiments. In the first experiment, 204 undergraduate students evaluated 42 different statements. Half of these statements were factual, and half were completely false.
The participants were told the statements came from either an average person, a known liar, or a known bullshitter. The researchers provided specific definitions of a liar and a bullshitter to the participants to ensure they understood the difference. The students then rated how likely each statement was to be true on an 11-point scale.
The data showed that participants rated statements from an alleged bullshitter as more truthful than the exact same statements made by an alleged liar. The average person was trusted the most, but the bullshitter was trusted significantly more than the liar. This initial finding shows people naturally assign a higher likelihood of truth to bullshitting than they do to intentional lies.
The specific terms used to describe the sources were not the main driver of these results. “Just that the labels themselves turned out to matter less than we expected, it wasn’t simply that ‘bullshitter’ sounds better than ‘liar’,” Petrocelli said. “When we controlled for the base rate of false statements in Experiment 3 and gave very explicit, careful definitions of what the source’s instructions were, the effect held up.”
Petrocelli added that this consistency was reassuring. “That gives me more confidence this is really tracking something about how people process source-indifference to truth, not just a reaction to a loaded word,” he explained. The researchers then moved to test how this baseline trust interacts with repeated exposure in a second experiment.
In the second experiment, 293 students participated in a test of the illusory truth effect. The researchers exposed participants to 66 statements and asked them to rate how interesting they were. This served as an initial exposure phase, where some statements appeared once, and some appeared twice.
Before the final truth rating task, the authors separated the participants into different groups. One group was told the author of the statements was instructed to include some obvious lies. Another group was told the author was instructed to include statements with no regard for the truth.
The scientists also manipulated when the participants received a warning about the false information. Half the participants were warned before they read any statements during the initial phase. The other half read the statements first and were warned only before the final truth rating task.
During the final task, everyone rated the truthfulness of 88 statements on a six-point scale. These included a mix of entirely new claims and the repeated claims from the first phase. The researchers then compared how the different warnings affected the students’ beliefs.
The results revealed that forewarning people about falsity before they read the statements reduced the illusory truth effect across all groups. However, when the warning came after the initial exposure, a major difference emerged. Participants in the liar and control groups successfully corrected their judgments, recognizing the false statements as untrue.
In contrast, participants in the bullshitter group still fell for the illusory truth effect. Even after learning the author had no regard for the truth, these students rated the repeated false statements as highly truthful. The repetition of the bullshit claims successfully tricked their minds into believing the statements.
Petrocelli found this specific dynamic particularly intriguing. “The most striking pattern to me was that forewarning worked very differently depending on timing,” he said. “When people were warned before exposure that some information might be bullshit or lies, the illusory truth effect was largely neutralized across the board.”
The delayed warning produced an entirely different response. “But when people only learned after the fact that they’d been exposed to bullshit, the effect not only persisted for bullshit, it was the strongest condition in the whole design,” Petrocelli noted. Lies and honest control claims actually got corrected downward once people learned the truth after exposure.
“That asymmetry, corrective efforts working for lies but seemingly backfiring or simply not working for bullshit, was the clearest empirical signature of insidiousness we could have hoped for,” Petrocelli explained. To confirm these patterns, the researchers conducted a third experiment with 318 students. The setup was nearly identical to the second experiment, but with a strict condition to ensure the results were not just based on assumptions about lying frequencies.
They explicitly told participants that exactly half of the statements were false, lies, or bullshit, depending on the assigned group. This held the frequency of deception completely equal across all scenarios. The authors found the exact same pattern as the previous test, providing evidence that repeated exposure to truth-indifferent claims bypasses critical thinking.
These outcomes suggest that recognizing a source as a liar stops the brain from linking repetition to truth, but recognizing a source as a bullshitter fails to put up the same mental blockade. Petrocelli highlighted how this tendency leaves people vulnerable. “The instinct to relax your guard around someone who’s ‘just talking out of their hat’ rather than deliberately lying to you is exactly backwards,” he explained.
“A known liar’s claims get flagged and rejected; a bullshitter’s claims, because they’re not certainly false, slide by with much less resistance, and repetition alone makes them feel truer over time,” Petrocelli said. He suggested that people change how they evaluate everyday conversations. “If anything, the practical takeaway is: don’t just ask ‘is this person lying to me,’ ask ‘does this person actually know or care whether this is true,’ and treat repeated exposure to indifferent talk with at least as much scrutiny as you’d give a claim you know to be contested,” he recommended.
Recognizing the boundaries of this study helps place the findings into proper context. Petrocelli pointed out two main caveats regarding the research. “First, our operationalization is narrow: we tested one specific cognitive manifestation of insidiousness, the magnitude of the illusory truth effect under repetition, not Frankfurt’s full philosophical claim about bullshit’s corrosive effect on public discourse generally,” he explained.
The second limitation involves how the sources were presented to the participants. “Our manipulation relied on labeling someone a ‘bullshitter’ or ‘liar’ via source instructions, not on demonstrably truth-indifferent behavior itself,” Petrocelli noted. “So strictly speaking, these findings are about the effects of the label and its associated expectations, and future work really needs designs where bullshit is behaviorally instantiated rather than just described.”
Future investigations will likely focus on expanding these initial discoveries into more complex scenarios. The current research relied on neutral, trivia-style statements, but real-world misinformation often centers around highly emotional topics. “One is moving from neutral trivia statements to emotionally charged, real-world content, political claims, health misinformation, since motivated reasoning could plausibly amplify or dampen these effects,” Petrocelli said of his next steps.
He also plans to test whether the effect holds when people are not explicitly warned about a source’s intentions. “And longer-term, we want to push toward interventions, could platforms or media literacy programs actually teach people to detect truth-indifference specifically, as opposed to just teaching general fact-checking or lie-detection skills, which our work suggests may not transfer well to bullshit?” he added.
The study, “When fools have greater influence than liars: testing the insidious bullshit hypothesis with the illusory truth effect,” was authored by John V. Petrocelli, Elijah N. Rice, and Joseph M. Curran.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/new-psychology-research-reveals-the-insidious-nature-of-bullshit/
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #BullshitResearch #IllusoryTruthEffect #Misinformation #PublicKnowledge #SourceIndifference #TruthBias #MediaLiteracy #PsychologyStudy #FactChecking #DisinformationChallenges
-
DATE: July 17, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: New psychology research reveals the insidious nature of bullshit
URL: https://www.psypost.org/new-psychology-research-reveals-the-insidious-nature-of-bullshit/
A recent study published in Current Psychology suggests that people are more likely to believe false information when it comes from someone who ignores the truth rather than a liar who actively tries to deceive. The research indicates that repeating statements made by someone indifferent to facts heavily increases how truthful those statements feel to readers. These findings provide evidence that casual disregard for reality poses a uniquely potent threat to public knowledge and belief.
The digital age makes tracking misinformation increasingly difficult. Information often spreads not just through intentional deception, but through a behavior known in psychology as bullshitting. In academic terms, a liar is someone who knows the truth and intentionally tries to mislead an audience. A bullshitter, on the other hand, communicates with little to no regard for the truth, evidence, or established facts.
A statement made by a bullshitter might happen to be true, or it might be false. The defining characteristic is the speaker’s total indifference to reality. Because bullshitters do not actively try to hide a specific truth, people often judge them less harshly than they judge outright liars.
John V. Petrocelli, a psychology professor at Wake Forest University and author of the book The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit, wanted to test the real-world impact of this behavior. He noted that philosopher Harry Frankfurt proposed the insidious bullshit hypothesis in 1986. This idea suggests that society’s tolerance for bullshitting actually creates more long-term harm to public knowledge than lying.
Past research supports this distinction. In a 2023 study, Petrocelli and his colleagues explored how untrustworthy sources influence consumer attitudes over time. Participants read an advertisement for a fictitious gluten-free pizza and then learned the advertiser was either a known liar or a known bullshitter.
After a two-week delay, participants who had been warned about the bullshitter reported more positive attitudes toward the pizza than those warned about the liar. This demonstrated a “sleeper effect,” where the deceptive influence of the bullshitter actually grew stronger over time. The researchers also found that people possess a higher “dismissal readiness” for lies, meaning they find it easier to entirely reject a known lie than a statement of bullshit.
“We’d already found that people evaluate bullshitting less harshly than lying, consistent with Frankfurt’s (1986) essay,” Petrocelli explained. “But the harder question Frankfurt raised, and one almost nobody had tested empirically, was whether bullshit actually does more damage to what people believe, precisely because it doesn’t trigger the same skepticism a known lie does.”
To test this idea further, researchers examined how bullshitting interacts with the illusory truth effect. The illusory truth effect is a psychological phenomenon where people tend to believe false information is correct simply after hearing it multiple times. When the human brain encounters a repeated statement, it processes that information more easily, and people often mistake this mental ease for actual truth.
Scientists wanted to see if knowing the source of a claim changes this effect. “The illusory truth effect literature gave me a clean, well-validated paradigm to test that consequence directly, rather than just people’s attitudes about bullshitting,” Petrocelli said. If a person knows a statement comes from a bullshitter rather than a liar, they might not filter the repeated information as strictly.
To investigate these dynamics, the authors designed a series of three experiments. In the first experiment, 204 undergraduate students evaluated 42 different statements. Half of these statements were factual, and half were completely false.
The participants were told the statements came from either an average person, a known liar, or a known bullshitter. The researchers provided specific definitions of a liar and a bullshitter to the participants to ensure they understood the difference. The students then rated how likely each statement was to be true on an 11-point scale.
The data showed that participants rated statements from an alleged bullshitter as more truthful than the exact same statements made by an alleged liar. The average person was trusted the most, but the bullshitter was trusted significantly more than the liar. This initial finding shows people naturally assign a higher likelihood of truth to bullshitting than they do to intentional lies.
The specific terms used to describe the sources were not the main driver of these results. “Just that the labels themselves turned out to matter less than we expected, it wasn’t simply that ‘bullshitter’ sounds better than ‘liar’,” Petrocelli said. “When we controlled for the base rate of false statements in Experiment 3 and gave very explicit, careful definitions of what the source’s instructions were, the effect held up.”
Petrocelli added that this consistency was reassuring. “That gives me more confidence this is really tracking something about how people process source-indifference to truth, not just a reaction to a loaded word,” he explained. The researchers then moved to test how this baseline trust interacts with repeated exposure in a second experiment.
In the second experiment, 293 students participated in a test of the illusory truth effect. The researchers exposed participants to 66 statements and asked them to rate how interesting they were. This served as an initial exposure phase, where some statements appeared once, and some appeared twice.
Before the final truth rating task, the authors separated the participants into different groups. One group was told the author of the statements was instructed to include some obvious lies. Another group was told the author was instructed to include statements with no regard for the truth.
The scientists also manipulated when the participants received a warning about the false information. Half the participants were warned before they read any statements during the initial phase. The other half read the statements first and were warned only before the final truth rating task.
During the final task, everyone rated the truthfulness of 88 statements on a six-point scale. These included a mix of entirely new claims and the repeated claims from the first phase. The researchers then compared how the different warnings affected the students’ beliefs.
The results revealed that forewarning people about falsity before they read the statements reduced the illusory truth effect across all groups. However, when the warning came after the initial exposure, a major difference emerged. Participants in the liar and control groups successfully corrected their judgments, recognizing the false statements as untrue.
In contrast, participants in the bullshitter group still fell for the illusory truth effect. Even after learning the author had no regard for the truth, these students rated the repeated false statements as highly truthful. The repetition of the bullshit claims successfully tricked their minds into believing the statements.
Petrocelli found this specific dynamic particularly intriguing. “The most striking pattern to me was that forewarning worked very differently depending on timing,” he said. “When people were warned before exposure that some information might be bullshit or lies, the illusory truth effect was largely neutralized across the board.”
The delayed warning produced an entirely different response. “But when people only learned after the fact that they’d been exposed to bullshit, the effect not only persisted for bullshit, it was the strongest condition in the whole design,” Petrocelli noted. Lies and honest control claims actually got corrected downward once people learned the truth after exposure.
“That asymmetry, corrective efforts working for lies but seemingly backfiring or simply not working for bullshit, was the clearest empirical signature of insidiousness we could have hoped for,” Petrocelli explained. To confirm these patterns, the researchers conducted a third experiment with 318 students. The setup was nearly identical to the second experiment, but with a strict condition to ensure the results were not just based on assumptions about lying frequencies.
They explicitly told participants that exactly half of the statements were false, lies, or bullshit, depending on the assigned group. This held the frequency of deception completely equal across all scenarios. The authors found the exact same pattern as the previous test, providing evidence that repeated exposure to truth-indifferent claims bypasses critical thinking.
These outcomes suggest that recognizing a source as a liar stops the brain from linking repetition to truth, but recognizing a source as a bullshitter fails to put up the same mental blockade. Petrocelli highlighted how this tendency leaves people vulnerable. “The instinct to relax your guard around someone who’s ‘just talking out of their hat’ rather than deliberately lying to you is exactly backwards,” he explained.
“A known liar’s claims get flagged and rejected; a bullshitter’s claims, because they’re not certainly false, slide by with much less resistance, and repetition alone makes them feel truer over time,” Petrocelli said. He suggested that people change how they evaluate everyday conversations. “If anything, the practical takeaway is: don’t just ask ‘is this person lying to me,’ ask ‘does this person actually know or care whether this is true,’ and treat repeated exposure to indifferent talk with at least as much scrutiny as you’d give a claim you know to be contested,” he recommended.
Recognizing the boundaries of this study helps place the findings into proper context. Petrocelli pointed out two main caveats regarding the research. “First, our operationalization is narrow: we tested one specific cognitive manifestation of insidiousness, the magnitude of the illusory truth effect under repetition, not Frankfurt’s full philosophical claim about bullshit’s corrosive effect on public discourse generally,” he explained.
The second limitation involves how the sources were presented to the participants. “Our manipulation relied on labeling someone a ‘bullshitter’ or ‘liar’ via source instructions, not on demonstrably truth-indifferent behavior itself,” Petrocelli noted. “So strictly speaking, these findings are about the effects of the label and its associated expectations, and future work really needs designs where bullshit is behaviorally instantiated rather than just described.”
Future investigations will likely focus on expanding these initial discoveries into more complex scenarios. The current research relied on neutral, trivia-style statements, but real-world misinformation often centers around highly emotional topics. “One is moving from neutral trivia statements to emotionally charged, real-world content, political claims, health misinformation, since motivated reasoning could plausibly amplify or dampen these effects,” Petrocelli said of his next steps.
He also plans to test whether the effect holds when people are not explicitly warned about a source’s intentions. “And longer-term, we want to push toward interventions, could platforms or media literacy programs actually teach people to detect truth-indifference specifically, as opposed to just teaching general fact-checking or lie-detection skills, which our work suggests may not transfer well to bullshit?” he added.
The study, “When fools have greater influence than liars: testing the insidious bullshit hypothesis with the illusory truth effect,” was authored by John V. Petrocelli, Elijah N. Rice, and Joseph M. Curran.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/new-psychology-research-reveals-the-insidious-nature-of-bullshit/
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #BullshitResearch #IllusoryTruthEffect #Misinformation #PublicKnowledge #SourceIndifference #TruthBias #MediaLiteracy #PsychologyStudy #FactChecking #DisinformationChallenges
-
DATE: July 17, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: New psychology research reveals the insidious nature of bullshit
URL: https://www.psypost.org/new-psychology-research-reveals-the-insidious-nature-of-bullshit/
A recent study published in Current Psychology suggests that people are more likely to believe false information when it comes from someone who ignores the truth rather than a liar who actively tries to deceive. The research indicates that repeating statements made by someone indifferent to facts heavily increases how truthful those statements feel to readers. These findings provide evidence that casual disregard for reality poses a uniquely potent threat to public knowledge and belief.
The digital age makes tracking misinformation increasingly difficult. Information often spreads not just through intentional deception, but through a behavior known in psychology as bullshitting. In academic terms, a liar is someone who knows the truth and intentionally tries to mislead an audience. A bullshitter, on the other hand, communicates with little to no regard for the truth, evidence, or established facts.
A statement made by a bullshitter might happen to be true, or it might be false. The defining characteristic is the speaker’s total indifference to reality. Because bullshitters do not actively try to hide a specific truth, people often judge them less harshly than they judge outright liars.
John V. Petrocelli, a psychology professor at Wake Forest University and author of the book The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit, wanted to test the real-world impact of this behavior. He noted that philosopher Harry Frankfurt proposed the insidious bullshit hypothesis in 1986. This idea suggests that society’s tolerance for bullshitting actually creates more long-term harm to public knowledge than lying.
Past research supports this distinction. In a 2023 study, Petrocelli and his colleagues explored how untrustworthy sources influence consumer attitudes over time. Participants read an advertisement for a fictitious gluten-free pizza and then learned the advertiser was either a known liar or a known bullshitter.
After a two-week delay, participants who had been warned about the bullshitter reported more positive attitudes toward the pizza than those warned about the liar. This demonstrated a “sleeper effect,” where the deceptive influence of the bullshitter actually grew stronger over time. The researchers also found that people possess a higher “dismissal readiness” for lies, meaning they find it easier to entirely reject a known lie than a statement of bullshit.
“We’d already found that people evaluate bullshitting less harshly than lying, consistent with Frankfurt’s (1986) essay,” Petrocelli explained. “But the harder question Frankfurt raised, and one almost nobody had tested empirically, was whether bullshit actually does more damage to what people believe, precisely because it doesn’t trigger the same skepticism a known lie does.”
To test this idea further, researchers examined how bullshitting interacts with the illusory truth effect. The illusory truth effect is a psychological phenomenon where people tend to believe false information is correct simply after hearing it multiple times. When the human brain encounters a repeated statement, it processes that information more easily, and people often mistake this mental ease for actual truth.
Scientists wanted to see if knowing the source of a claim changes this effect. “The illusory truth effect literature gave me a clean, well-validated paradigm to test that consequence directly, rather than just people’s attitudes about bullshitting,” Petrocelli said. If a person knows a statement comes from a bullshitter rather than a liar, they might not filter the repeated information as strictly.
To investigate these dynamics, the authors designed a series of three experiments. In the first experiment, 204 undergraduate students evaluated 42 different statements. Half of these statements were factual, and half were completely false.
The participants were told the statements came from either an average person, a known liar, or a known bullshitter. The researchers provided specific definitions of a liar and a bullshitter to the participants to ensure they understood the difference. The students then rated how likely each statement was to be true on an 11-point scale.
The data showed that participants rated statements from an alleged bullshitter as more truthful than the exact same statements made by an alleged liar. The average person was trusted the most, but the bullshitter was trusted significantly more than the liar. This initial finding shows people naturally assign a higher likelihood of truth to bullshitting than they do to intentional lies.
The specific terms used to describe the sources were not the main driver of these results. “Just that the labels themselves turned out to matter less than we expected, it wasn’t simply that ‘bullshitter’ sounds better than ‘liar’,” Petrocelli said. “When we controlled for the base rate of false statements in Experiment 3 and gave very explicit, careful definitions of what the source’s instructions were, the effect held up.”
Petrocelli added that this consistency was reassuring. “That gives me more confidence this is really tracking something about how people process source-indifference to truth, not just a reaction to a loaded word,” he explained. The researchers then moved to test how this baseline trust interacts with repeated exposure in a second experiment.
In the second experiment, 293 students participated in a test of the illusory truth effect. The researchers exposed participants to 66 statements and asked them to rate how interesting they were. This served as an initial exposure phase, where some statements appeared once, and some appeared twice.
Before the final truth rating task, the authors separated the participants into different groups. One group was told the author of the statements was instructed to include some obvious lies. Another group was told the author was instructed to include statements with no regard for the truth.
The scientists also manipulated when the participants received a warning about the false information. Half the participants were warned before they read any statements during the initial phase. The other half read the statements first and were warned only before the final truth rating task.
During the final task, everyone rated the truthfulness of 88 statements on a six-point scale. These included a mix of entirely new claims and the repeated claims from the first phase. The researchers then compared how the different warnings affected the students’ beliefs.
The results revealed that forewarning people about falsity before they read the statements reduced the illusory truth effect across all groups. However, when the warning came after the initial exposure, a major difference emerged. Participants in the liar and control groups successfully corrected their judgments, recognizing the false statements as untrue.
In contrast, participants in the bullshitter group still fell for the illusory truth effect. Even after learning the author had no regard for the truth, these students rated the repeated false statements as highly truthful. The repetition of the bullshit claims successfully tricked their minds into believing the statements.
Petrocelli found this specific dynamic particularly intriguing. “The most striking pattern to me was that forewarning worked very differently depending on timing,” he said. “When people were warned before exposure that some information might be bullshit or lies, the illusory truth effect was largely neutralized across the board.”
The delayed warning produced an entirely different response. “But when people only learned after the fact that they’d been exposed to bullshit, the effect not only persisted for bullshit, it was the strongest condition in the whole design,” Petrocelli noted. Lies and honest control claims actually got corrected downward once people learned the truth after exposure.
“That asymmetry, corrective efforts working for lies but seemingly backfiring or simply not working for bullshit, was the clearest empirical signature of insidiousness we could have hoped for,” Petrocelli explained. To confirm these patterns, the researchers conducted a third experiment with 318 students. The setup was nearly identical to the second experiment, but with a strict condition to ensure the results were not just based on assumptions about lying frequencies.
They explicitly told participants that exactly half of the statements were false, lies, or bullshit, depending on the assigned group. This held the frequency of deception completely equal across all scenarios. The authors found the exact same pattern as the previous test, providing evidence that repeated exposure to truth-indifferent claims bypasses critical thinking.
These outcomes suggest that recognizing a source as a liar stops the brain from linking repetition to truth, but recognizing a source as a bullshitter fails to put up the same mental blockade. Petrocelli highlighted how this tendency leaves people vulnerable. “The instinct to relax your guard around someone who’s ‘just talking out of their hat’ rather than deliberately lying to you is exactly backwards,” he explained.
“A known liar’s claims get flagged and rejected; a bullshitter’s claims, because they’re not certainly false, slide by with much less resistance, and repetition alone makes them feel truer over time,” Petrocelli said. He suggested that people change how they evaluate everyday conversations. “If anything, the practical takeaway is: don’t just ask ‘is this person lying to me,’ ask ‘does this person actually know or care whether this is true,’ and treat repeated exposure to indifferent talk with at least as much scrutiny as you’d give a claim you know to be contested,” he recommended.
Recognizing the boundaries of this study helps place the findings into proper context. Petrocelli pointed out two main caveats regarding the research. “First, our operationalization is narrow: we tested one specific cognitive manifestation of insidiousness, the magnitude of the illusory truth effect under repetition, not Frankfurt’s full philosophical claim about bullshit’s corrosive effect on public discourse generally,” he explained.
The second limitation involves how the sources were presented to the participants. “Our manipulation relied on labeling someone a ‘bullshitter’ or ‘liar’ via source instructions, not on demonstrably truth-indifferent behavior itself,” Petrocelli noted. “So strictly speaking, these findings are about the effects of the label and its associated expectations, and future work really needs designs where bullshit is behaviorally instantiated rather than just described.”
Future investigations will likely focus on expanding these initial discoveries into more complex scenarios. The current research relied on neutral, trivia-style statements, but real-world misinformation often centers around highly emotional topics. “One is moving from neutral trivia statements to emotionally charged, real-world content, political claims, health misinformation, since motivated reasoning could plausibly amplify or dampen these effects,” Petrocelli said of his next steps.
He also plans to test whether the effect holds when people are not explicitly warned about a source’s intentions. “And longer-term, we want to push toward interventions, could platforms or media literacy programs actually teach people to detect truth-indifference specifically, as opposed to just teaching general fact-checking or lie-detection skills, which our work suggests may not transfer well to bullshit?” he added.
The study, “When fools have greater influence than liars: testing the insidious bullshit hypothesis with the illusory truth effect,” was authored by John V. Petrocelli, Elijah N. Rice, and Joseph M. Curran.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/new-psychology-research-reveals-the-insidious-nature-of-bullshit/
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #BullshitResearch #IllusoryTruthEffect #Misinformation #PublicKnowledge #SourceIndifference #TruthBias #MediaLiteracy #PsychologyStudy #FactChecking #DisinformationChallenges
-
DATE: July 17, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: New psychology research reveals the insidious nature of bullshit
URL: https://www.psypost.org/new-psychology-research-reveals-the-insidious-nature-of-bullshit/
A recent study published in Current Psychology suggests that people are more likely to believe false information when it comes from someone who ignores the truth rather than a liar who actively tries to deceive. The research indicates that repeating statements made by someone indifferent to facts heavily increases how truthful those statements feel to readers. These findings provide evidence that casual disregard for reality poses a uniquely potent threat to public knowledge and belief.
The digital age makes tracking misinformation increasingly difficult. Information often spreads not just through intentional deception, but through a behavior known in psychology as bullshitting. In academic terms, a liar is someone who knows the truth and intentionally tries to mislead an audience. A bullshitter, on the other hand, communicates with little to no regard for the truth, evidence, or established facts.
A statement made by a bullshitter might happen to be true, or it might be false. The defining characteristic is the speaker’s total indifference to reality. Because bullshitters do not actively try to hide a specific truth, people often judge them less harshly than they judge outright liars.
John V. Petrocelli, a psychology professor at Wake Forest University and author of the book The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit, wanted to test the real-world impact of this behavior. He noted that philosopher Harry Frankfurt proposed the insidious bullshit hypothesis in 1986. This idea suggests that society’s tolerance for bullshitting actually creates more long-term harm to public knowledge than lying.
Past research supports this distinction. In a 2023 study, Petrocelli and his colleagues explored how untrustworthy sources influence consumer attitudes over time. Participants read an advertisement for a fictitious gluten-free pizza and then learned the advertiser was either a known liar or a known bullshitter.
After a two-week delay, participants who had been warned about the bullshitter reported more positive attitudes toward the pizza than those warned about the liar. This demonstrated a “sleeper effect,” where the deceptive influence of the bullshitter actually grew stronger over time. The researchers also found that people possess a higher “dismissal readiness” for lies, meaning they find it easier to entirely reject a known lie than a statement of bullshit.
“We’d already found that people evaluate bullshitting less harshly than lying, consistent with Frankfurt’s (1986) essay,” Petrocelli explained. “But the harder question Frankfurt raised, and one almost nobody had tested empirically, was whether bullshit actually does more damage to what people believe, precisely because it doesn’t trigger the same skepticism a known lie does.”
To test this idea further, researchers examined how bullshitting interacts with the illusory truth effect. The illusory truth effect is a psychological phenomenon where people tend to believe false information is correct simply after hearing it multiple times. When the human brain encounters a repeated statement, it processes that information more easily, and people often mistake this mental ease for actual truth.
Scientists wanted to see if knowing the source of a claim changes this effect. “The illusory truth effect literature gave me a clean, well-validated paradigm to test that consequence directly, rather than just people’s attitudes about bullshitting,” Petrocelli said. If a person knows a statement comes from a bullshitter rather than a liar, they might not filter the repeated information as strictly.
To investigate these dynamics, the authors designed a series of three experiments. In the first experiment, 204 undergraduate students evaluated 42 different statements. Half of these statements were factual, and half were completely false.
The participants were told the statements came from either an average person, a known liar, or a known bullshitter. The researchers provided specific definitions of a liar and a bullshitter to the participants to ensure they understood the difference. The students then rated how likely each statement was to be true on an 11-point scale.
The data showed that participants rated statements from an alleged bullshitter as more truthful than the exact same statements made by an alleged liar. The average person was trusted the most, but the bullshitter was trusted significantly more than the liar. This initial finding shows people naturally assign a higher likelihood of truth to bullshitting than they do to intentional lies.
The specific terms used to describe the sources were not the main driver of these results. “Just that the labels themselves turned out to matter less than we expected, it wasn’t simply that ‘bullshitter’ sounds better than ‘liar’,” Petrocelli said. “When we controlled for the base rate of false statements in Experiment 3 and gave very explicit, careful definitions of what the source’s instructions were, the effect held up.”
Petrocelli added that this consistency was reassuring. “That gives me more confidence this is really tracking something about how people process source-indifference to truth, not just a reaction to a loaded word,” he explained. The researchers then moved to test how this baseline trust interacts with repeated exposure in a second experiment.
In the second experiment, 293 students participated in a test of the illusory truth effect. The researchers exposed participants to 66 statements and asked them to rate how interesting they were. This served as an initial exposure phase, where some statements appeared once, and some appeared twice.
Before the final truth rating task, the authors separated the participants into different groups. One group was told the author of the statements was instructed to include some obvious lies. Another group was told the author was instructed to include statements with no regard for the truth.
The scientists also manipulated when the participants received a warning about the false information. Half the participants were warned before they read any statements during the initial phase. The other half read the statements first and were warned only before the final truth rating task.
During the final task, everyone rated the truthfulness of 88 statements on a six-point scale. These included a mix of entirely new claims and the repeated claims from the first phase. The researchers then compared how the different warnings affected the students’ beliefs.
The results revealed that forewarning people about falsity before they read the statements reduced the illusory truth effect across all groups. However, when the warning came after the initial exposure, a major difference emerged. Participants in the liar and control groups successfully corrected their judgments, recognizing the false statements as untrue.
In contrast, participants in the bullshitter group still fell for the illusory truth effect. Even after learning the author had no regard for the truth, these students rated the repeated false statements as highly truthful. The repetition of the bullshit claims successfully tricked their minds into believing the statements.
Petrocelli found this specific dynamic particularly intriguing. “The most striking pattern to me was that forewarning worked very differently depending on timing,” he said. “When people were warned before exposure that some information might be bullshit or lies, the illusory truth effect was largely neutralized across the board.”
The delayed warning produced an entirely different response. “But when people only learned after the fact that they’d been exposed to bullshit, the effect not only persisted for bullshit, it was the strongest condition in the whole design,” Petrocelli noted. Lies and honest control claims actually got corrected downward once people learned the truth after exposure.
“That asymmetry, corrective efforts working for lies but seemingly backfiring or simply not working for bullshit, was the clearest empirical signature of insidiousness we could have hoped for,” Petrocelli explained. To confirm these patterns, the researchers conducted a third experiment with 318 students. The setup was nearly identical to the second experiment, but with a strict condition to ensure the results were not just based on assumptions about lying frequencies.
They explicitly told participants that exactly half of the statements were false, lies, or bullshit, depending on the assigned group. This held the frequency of deception completely equal across all scenarios. The authors found the exact same pattern as the previous test, providing evidence that repeated exposure to truth-indifferent claims bypasses critical thinking.
These outcomes suggest that recognizing a source as a liar stops the brain from linking repetition to truth, but recognizing a source as a bullshitter fails to put up the same mental blockade. Petrocelli highlighted how this tendency leaves people vulnerable. “The instinct to relax your guard around someone who’s ‘just talking out of their hat’ rather than deliberately lying to you is exactly backwards,” he explained.
“A known liar’s claims get flagged and rejected; a bullshitter’s claims, because they’re not certainly false, slide by with much less resistance, and repetition alone makes them feel truer over time,” Petrocelli said. He suggested that people change how they evaluate everyday conversations. “If anything, the practical takeaway is: don’t just ask ‘is this person lying to me,’ ask ‘does this person actually know or care whether this is true,’ and treat repeated exposure to indifferent talk with at least as much scrutiny as you’d give a claim you know to be contested,” he recommended.
Recognizing the boundaries of this study helps place the findings into proper context. Petrocelli pointed out two main caveats regarding the research. “First, our operationalization is narrow: we tested one specific cognitive manifestation of insidiousness, the magnitude of the illusory truth effect under repetition, not Frankfurt’s full philosophical claim about bullshit’s corrosive effect on public discourse generally,” he explained.
The second limitation involves how the sources were presented to the participants. “Our manipulation relied on labeling someone a ‘bullshitter’ or ‘liar’ via source instructions, not on demonstrably truth-indifferent behavior itself,” Petrocelli noted. “So strictly speaking, these findings are about the effects of the label and its associated expectations, and future work really needs designs where bullshit is behaviorally instantiated rather than just described.”
Future investigations will likely focus on expanding these initial discoveries into more complex scenarios. The current research relied on neutral, trivia-style statements, but real-world misinformation often centers around highly emotional topics. “One is moving from neutral trivia statements to emotionally charged, real-world content, political claims, health misinformation, since motivated reasoning could plausibly amplify or dampen these effects,” Petrocelli said of his next steps.
He also plans to test whether the effect holds when people are not explicitly warned about a source’s intentions. “And longer-term, we want to push toward interventions, could platforms or media literacy programs actually teach people to detect truth-indifference specifically, as opposed to just teaching general fact-checking or lie-detection skills, which our work suggests may not transfer well to bullshit?” he added.
The study, “When fools have greater influence than liars: testing the insidious bullshit hypothesis with the illusory truth effect,” was authored by John V. Petrocelli, Elijah N. Rice, and Joseph M. Curran.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/new-psychology-research-reveals-the-insidious-nature-of-bullshit/
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DATE: July 11, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Letting go of a rigid self-image might be the secret to meditation’s mental health benefits
New research provides evidence that different types of meditation can effectively reduce symptoms of depression and feelings of threat to personal identity. The findings suggest that focusing attention on breathing and engaging in introspective self-inquiry both offer significant mental health benefits, although they operate through slightly different mental pathways. The research was published in the journal Mindfulness.
Depression involves rigid and negative ways of thinking about oneself and the world. A major factor in depression is feeling an identity threat, which refers to the perception that a person’s self-concept or self-esteem is being attacked or devalued by others.
Individuals who hold dysfunctional attitudes tend to view these perceived threats through a highly negative filter. Dysfunctional attitudes are maladaptive beliefs that people hold about themselves, such as thinking they are a complete failure if they make a single mistake at work. These rigid beliefs reinforce feelings of distress and worsen depressive symptoms over time.
The study was conducted as part of doctoral research by first author Céline Stinus, a psychology researcher at the University of Navarra in Spain. The research was completed under the supervision of her co-author, Professor Sophie Berjot from the University of Reims Champagne Ardenne.
“I came to this study through a simple question: what if vulnerability to depression is not only about negative thoughts or low mood, but also about the way we relate to ourselves?” Stinus explained to PsyPost. “My background is in clinical psychology, and I have long been interested in why some people experience their own self, their failures, emotions, identity, or life story, as something fragile, threatening, or constantly in need of protection.”
“At the same time, I became increasingly interested in contemplative practices that do not only aim to calm the mind, but to transform the way we experience the self,” Stinus continued. “This led me to deconstructive forms of meditation, which are still much less studied than attention-based practices. They are fascinating because they invite people to examine the sense of ‘me’ itself.”
In the study, the authors explore “selflessness” as a way to relieve psychological distress. “In this study, I use the term ‘selflessness’ to describe this more flexible relationship to the self, not the absence of a self, but a self that is less rigid, less defensive, and less constantly experienced as under threat,” Stinus explained. “For me, the central question became whether cultivating this kind of relationship to the self could be one pathway toward reducing vulnerability to depression.”
Meditation is not a single practice but rather a broad family of techniques designed to train the mind. The authors focused on two specific types of meditation: attentional and deconstructive. Attentional meditation involves focusing the mind on a specific object, like the rhythm of breathing.
Deconstructive meditation asks practitioners to actively question their thoughts and feelings. This process, often called self-inquiry, encourages people to observe a mental event and ask where it comes from or why they identify with it. While attentional meditation is common in modern clinical settings, deconstructive practices are much less studied by science.
“The main takeaway is that meditation is not just one thing. Different practices may train different psychological skills,” Stinus said. “Some practices, such as breath meditation or body scan, can help stabilize attention, calm the body, or regulate emotions.”
“Deconstructive meditation goes one step further by inviting people to look directly at the sense of ‘me’: the inner story of who we are, how we judge ourselves, and how we react when we fail, succeed, feel criticized, or compare ourselves to others,” Stinus noted. “This matters because vulnerability to depression is often not only about having negative thoughts, but also involve experiencing the self as fragile, inadequate, or constantly under threat.”
“Our findings suggest that deconstructive meditation may help loosen this rigid relationship to oneself, allowing people to relate to their thoughts, emotions, and identity with more flexibility and less self-criticism,” Stinus said. To test this, the researchers recruited 147 adult participants for the experiment. They screened the volunteers to exclude experienced meditators, individuals taking psychiatric medications, and people with existing clinical depression diagnoses.
They randomly assigned the eligible participants into three equal groups of 49 people each. One group practiced focused-attention meditation, the second practiced self-inquiry meditation, and the third served as a wait-list control group. Participants in the control group were simply told they were on a wait-list due to high enrollment.
The meditation programs lasted for four weeks. Participants in the two active groups attended a weekly online group session that lasted sixty minutes. The primary author led these sessions, which included guided practices and time for group discussion.
Participants were also asked to practice at home for twenty minutes a day, five days a week, using audio recordings provided in a digital brochure. The focused-attention group practiced observing their breath and performing body scans. The focused-attention participants also practiced a daily exercise called “Train Your Attention Muscle.”
This required them to notice when their mind started wandering to uncomfortable topics and to quickly redirect their focus back to their breath. The self-inquiry group practiced a slightly different daily exercise called “STOP, I Contemplate.” This self-inquiry exercise asked participants to pause during their day to observe a current thought or emotional narrative, instructing them to reflect on the origin of the thought and question its absolute truth.
To measure the effects, participants filled out extensive questionnaires before and after the four-week period. The data provides evidence that both meditation styles are broadly beneficial for mental health. Both the focused-attention group and the self-inquiry group experienced greater reductions in depressive symptoms compared to the wait-list group.
The authors found no significant difference between the two meditation styles in reducing depressive symptoms or identity threat. Both styles proved similarly effective for improving these specific outcomes. The focused-attention group experienced significantly greater reductions in dysfunctional attitudes than both the self-inquiry group and the control group.
During the process, some unexpected patterns emerged regarding participant comfort. “What struck me was the gap between what I expected people to find most useful and what they seemed to find most comfortable,” Stinus said. “I was personally very drawn to deconstructive practices because they target something we all struggle with in daily life: being caught in our thoughts, self-judgments, emotional reactions, and stories about who we are.”
“But many participants seemed more at ease with practices such as breath meditation or body scan, which are closer to the common image of meditation as calming down or reducing stress,” she added. “This points to an important misunderstanding about meditation. Meditation is often presented as a way to feel better or escape discomfort.”
“But some forms of meditation are not designed simply to make us comfortable,” Stinus explained. “They invite us to turn toward patterns that are usually automatic or avoided. That can be uncomfortable at first, but also deeply liberating, because it helps us see that we do not have to be so identified with every thought, emotion, or story about ourselves.”
The self-inquiry practice had unique effects on feelings of connection to the outside world. Exploratory analyses suggest that only the self-inquiry group showed significant increases in feeling connected to humanity and feeling connected to nature. This suggests that questioning the self might help people feel more bonded to their environment and peers.
The researchers used statistical models to see exactly which mental changes explained the drop in negative symptoms. For the focused-attention group, increased cognitive decentering primarily explained the drop in depressive symptoms and dysfunctional attitudes. In the self-inquiry group, increased feelings of connection to humanity helped explain the reduction in identity threat.
Readers should be cautious not to view one method as superior. “One potential misinterpretation would be to read the study as saying that one type of meditation is simply ‘better’ than another,” Stinus said. “I do not think this is the right conclusion. The goal was not to rank meditation practices, but to better understand their specific effects and mechanisms.”
“Different practices may serve different psychological functions,” Stinus continued. “When someone feels overwhelmed, anxious, or unable to stabilize attention, practices such as breath meditation or body scan may offer grounding and regulation. Deconstructive practices may be especially relevant when the central difficulty is being strongly identified with painful thoughts, self-judgments, or stories about who we are.”
“So I would not think of meditation practices as a hierarchy from basic to advanced, or from weak to powerful,” she noted. “I would think of them more as different tools that may be more or less appropriate depending on the person, the moment, and the psychological process we are trying to work with. In practice, the goal is probably not to choose one practice and discard the others, but to combine them in a more precise and personalized way.”
When interpreting the study’s impact, the context of the intervention matters. “Readers should keep in mind that psychological effects are never completely isolated,” Stinus explained. “Even in a randomized controlled trial, we are not studying a meditation technique in a vacuum.”
“People enter an intervention with their own history, expectations, emotional state, relationships, habits, and life context,” she added. “The structure of the program also matters: regular practice, guidance from an instructor, and sometimes sharing the experience with others can all contribute to change.”
“That said, I see the findings as meaningful,” Stinus continued. “Beyond the statistical effect sizes, this study is a preliminary step toward a different way of understanding and preventing depression. The results suggest that people at risk for depression may begin to become less identified with painful thoughts and more flexible in the way they relate to themselves.”
“This is clinically relevant because many people do not only struggle with difficult experiences, thoughts, emotions, social interactions, social roles, or memories, but with the feeling that these experiences define who they are,” Stinus said. “Meditation may therefore be a valuable preventive or complementary tool, not as a replacement for therapy, but as a way to support people in working with self-critical and threatening patterns in daily life.”
The study has several limitations that should be noted when interpreting the findings. The sample was predominantly female, which means the results might not perfectly represent how all people respond to these techniques. The authors also relied entirely on self-reported questionnaires, which can sometimes be influenced by a participant’s desire to give a good impression.
A high number of participants in the wait-list group dropped out of the study before the second assessment. This high dropout rate could potentially create statistical biases when comparing the active groups to the control group. The study also did not include a long-term follow-up assessment, leaving it unknown whether the mental health benefits would last months or years later.
The authors also suggest that the completely secular nature of the program might explain the unexpected results regarding dysfunctional attitudes. Deconstructive practices in traditional settings often rely on deep spiritual frameworks that were intentionally removed for this scientific trial. Without that spiritual context, the self-inquiry practice might lack some of the depth needed to alter deeply ingrained negative beliefs during a short four-week period.
“One thing I would add is that meditation is not only a method. It is also a worldview in action,” Stinus noted. “The same exercise can become something very different depending on how it is framed.”
“Following the breath can be taught as relaxation, attention training, a clinical skill, a spiritual discipline, or a way to investigate the nature of the self,” she explained. “From the outside, the practice may look similar. From the inside, it may not be the same practice at all.”
“For me, meaning is not just a cultural ‘add-on’ to meditation. It shapes what people expect, how they interpret what happens during practice, how they deal with discomfort, and why they continue,” Stinus said. “This may be especially important for deconstructive practices, where the goal is not only to feel better, but to transform how we relate to thoughts, emotions, and the sense of ‘me.'”
“So I do not think the future question is simply whether meditation should be secular or spiritual,” she added. “The deeper question is: what kind of meaning framework helps people practice safely, sustain the practice, and make sense of what they experience? This is precisely the direction of some of my current work, so stay tuned.”
Exploring these meaning frameworks is a next step for the researchers. “My long-term goal is to continue studying what meditation can reveal about the mind, the self, and psychological suffering,” Stinus said. “We are still at a very early stage in understanding the transformative potential of meditation, especially when it comes to advanced meditation, deconstructive practices, and self-related processes.”
“At the same time, there is a very practical challenge that researchers need to take seriously: how do we help people actually start meditating, and keep going over time?” she asked. “It is not enough to show that meditation can be beneficial if it remains accessible only to a small minority of highly motivated people.”
“For me, the future is not only about showing that meditation ‘works.’ It is about developing more precise, realistic, and personalized meditation-based programs that people can sustain in real life,” Stinus concluded. “If we want meditation to have transformative and potentially liberating effects, we need to understand not only its mechanisms, but also how to make it compatible with the realities of people’s daily lives.”
The study, “Preventing Depression through Selflessness: Effects and Mechanisms of Attentional vs. Deconstructive Meditation in a Three-Arm Randomized Controlled Trial“, was authored by Céline Stinus and Sophie Berjot.
-------------------------------------------------
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #Mindfulness #Selflessness #DeconstructiveMeditation #SelfInquiry #BreathMeditation #DepressionRelief #MentalHealthResearch #IdentityThreat #AttentionTraining #PsychologyStudy
-
DATE: July 11, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Letting go of a rigid self-image might be the secret to meditation’s mental health benefits
New research provides evidence that different types of meditation can effectively reduce symptoms of depression and feelings of threat to personal identity. The findings suggest that focusing attention on breathing and engaging in introspective self-inquiry both offer significant mental health benefits, although they operate through slightly different mental pathways. The research was published in the journal Mindfulness.
Depression involves rigid and negative ways of thinking about oneself and the world. A major factor in depression is feeling an identity threat, which refers to the perception that a person’s self-concept or self-esteem is being attacked or devalued by others.
Individuals who hold dysfunctional attitudes tend to view these perceived threats through a highly negative filter. Dysfunctional attitudes are maladaptive beliefs that people hold about themselves, such as thinking they are a complete failure if they make a single mistake at work. These rigid beliefs reinforce feelings of distress and worsen depressive symptoms over time.
The study was conducted as part of doctoral research by first author Céline Stinus, a psychology researcher at the University of Navarra in Spain. The research was completed under the supervision of her co-author, Professor Sophie Berjot from the University of Reims Champagne Ardenne.
“I came to this study through a simple question: what if vulnerability to depression is not only about negative thoughts or low mood, but also about the way we relate to ourselves?” Stinus explained to PsyPost. “My background is in clinical psychology, and I have long been interested in why some people experience their own self, their failures, emotions, identity, or life story, as something fragile, threatening, or constantly in need of protection.”
“At the same time, I became increasingly interested in contemplative practices that do not only aim to calm the mind, but to transform the way we experience the self,” Stinus continued. “This led me to deconstructive forms of meditation, which are still much less studied than attention-based practices. They are fascinating because they invite people to examine the sense of ‘me’ itself.”
In the study, the authors explore “selflessness” as a way to relieve psychological distress. “In this study, I use the term ‘selflessness’ to describe this more flexible relationship to the self, not the absence of a self, but a self that is less rigid, less defensive, and less constantly experienced as under threat,” Stinus explained. “For me, the central question became whether cultivating this kind of relationship to the self could be one pathway toward reducing vulnerability to depression.”
Meditation is not a single practice but rather a broad family of techniques designed to train the mind. The authors focused on two specific types of meditation: attentional and deconstructive. Attentional meditation involves focusing the mind on a specific object, like the rhythm of breathing.
Deconstructive meditation asks practitioners to actively question their thoughts and feelings. This process, often called self-inquiry, encourages people to observe a mental event and ask where it comes from or why they identify with it. While attentional meditation is common in modern clinical settings, deconstructive practices are much less studied by science.
“The main takeaway is that meditation is not just one thing. Different practices may train different psychological skills,” Stinus said. “Some practices, such as breath meditation or body scan, can help stabilize attention, calm the body, or regulate emotions.”
“Deconstructive meditation goes one step further by inviting people to look directly at the sense of ‘me’: the inner story of who we are, how we judge ourselves, and how we react when we fail, succeed, feel criticized, or compare ourselves to others,” Stinus noted. “This matters because vulnerability to depression is often not only about having negative thoughts, but also involve experiencing the self as fragile, inadequate, or constantly under threat.”
“Our findings suggest that deconstructive meditation may help loosen this rigid relationship to oneself, allowing people to relate to their thoughts, emotions, and identity with more flexibility and less self-criticism,” Stinus said. To test this, the researchers recruited 147 adult participants for the experiment. They screened the volunteers to exclude experienced meditators, individuals taking psychiatric medications, and people with existing clinical depression diagnoses.
They randomly assigned the eligible participants into three equal groups of 49 people each. One group practiced focused-attention meditation, the second practiced self-inquiry meditation, and the third served as a wait-list control group. Participants in the control group were simply told they were on a wait-list due to high enrollment.
The meditation programs lasted for four weeks. Participants in the two active groups attended a weekly online group session that lasted sixty minutes. The primary author led these sessions, which included guided practices and time for group discussion.
Participants were also asked to practice at home for twenty minutes a day, five days a week, using audio recordings provided in a digital brochure. The focused-attention group practiced observing their breath and performing body scans. The focused-attention participants also practiced a daily exercise called “Train Your Attention Muscle.”
This required them to notice when their mind started wandering to uncomfortable topics and to quickly redirect their focus back to their breath. The self-inquiry group practiced a slightly different daily exercise called “STOP, I Contemplate.” This self-inquiry exercise asked participants to pause during their day to observe a current thought or emotional narrative, instructing them to reflect on the origin of the thought and question its absolute truth.
To measure the effects, participants filled out extensive questionnaires before and after the four-week period. The data provides evidence that both meditation styles are broadly beneficial for mental health. Both the focused-attention group and the self-inquiry group experienced greater reductions in depressive symptoms compared to the wait-list group.
The authors found no significant difference between the two meditation styles in reducing depressive symptoms or identity threat. Both styles proved similarly effective for improving these specific outcomes. The focused-attention group experienced significantly greater reductions in dysfunctional attitudes than both the self-inquiry group and the control group.
During the process, some unexpected patterns emerged regarding participant comfort. “What struck me was the gap between what I expected people to find most useful and what they seemed to find most comfortable,” Stinus said. “I was personally very drawn to deconstructive practices because they target something we all struggle with in daily life: being caught in our thoughts, self-judgments, emotional reactions, and stories about who we are.”
“But many participants seemed more at ease with practices such as breath meditation or body scan, which are closer to the common image of meditation as calming down or reducing stress,” she added. “This points to an important misunderstanding about meditation. Meditation is often presented as a way to feel better or escape discomfort.”
“But some forms of meditation are not designed simply to make us comfortable,” Stinus explained. “They invite us to turn toward patterns that are usually automatic or avoided. That can be uncomfortable at first, but also deeply liberating, because it helps us see that we do not have to be so identified with every thought, emotion, or story about ourselves.”
The self-inquiry practice had unique effects on feelings of connection to the outside world. Exploratory analyses suggest that only the self-inquiry group showed significant increases in feeling connected to humanity and feeling connected to nature. This suggests that questioning the self might help people feel more bonded to their environment and peers.
The researchers used statistical models to see exactly which mental changes explained the drop in negative symptoms. For the focused-attention group, increased cognitive decentering primarily explained the drop in depressive symptoms and dysfunctional attitudes. In the self-inquiry group, increased feelings of connection to humanity helped explain the reduction in identity threat.
Readers should be cautious not to view one method as superior. “One potential misinterpretation would be to read the study as saying that one type of meditation is simply ‘better’ than another,” Stinus said. “I do not think this is the right conclusion. The goal was not to rank meditation practices, but to better understand their specific effects and mechanisms.”
“Different practices may serve different psychological functions,” Stinus continued. “When someone feels overwhelmed, anxious, or unable to stabilize attention, practices such as breath meditation or body scan may offer grounding and regulation. Deconstructive practices may be especially relevant when the central difficulty is being strongly identified with painful thoughts, self-judgments, or stories about who we are.”
“So I would not think of meditation practices as a hierarchy from basic to advanced, or from weak to powerful,” she noted. “I would think of them more as different tools that may be more or less appropriate depending on the person, the moment, and the psychological process we are trying to work with. In practice, the goal is probably not to choose one practice and discard the others, but to combine them in a more precise and personalized way.”
When interpreting the study’s impact, the context of the intervention matters. “Readers should keep in mind that psychological effects are never completely isolated,” Stinus explained. “Even in a randomized controlled trial, we are not studying a meditation technique in a vacuum.”
“People enter an intervention with their own history, expectations, emotional state, relationships, habits, and life context,” she added. “The structure of the program also matters: regular practice, guidance from an instructor, and sometimes sharing the experience with others can all contribute to change.”
“That said, I see the findings as meaningful,” Stinus continued. “Beyond the statistical effect sizes, this study is a preliminary step toward a different way of understanding and preventing depression. The results suggest that people at risk for depression may begin to become less identified with painful thoughts and more flexible in the way they relate to themselves.”
“This is clinically relevant because many people do not only struggle with difficult experiences, thoughts, emotions, social interactions, social roles, or memories, but with the feeling that these experiences define who they are,” Stinus said. “Meditation may therefore be a valuable preventive or complementary tool, not as a replacement for therapy, but as a way to support people in working with self-critical and threatening patterns in daily life.”
The study has several limitations that should be noted when interpreting the findings. The sample was predominantly female, which means the results might not perfectly represent how all people respond to these techniques. The authors also relied entirely on self-reported questionnaires, which can sometimes be influenced by a participant’s desire to give a good impression.
A high number of participants in the wait-list group dropped out of the study before the second assessment. This high dropout rate could potentially create statistical biases when comparing the active groups to the control group. The study also did not include a long-term follow-up assessment, leaving it unknown whether the mental health benefits would last months or years later.
The authors also suggest that the completely secular nature of the program might explain the unexpected results regarding dysfunctional attitudes. Deconstructive practices in traditional settings often rely on deep spiritual frameworks that were intentionally removed for this scientific trial. Without that spiritual context, the self-inquiry practice might lack some of the depth needed to alter deeply ingrained negative beliefs during a short four-week period.
“One thing I would add is that meditation is not only a method. It is also a worldview in action,” Stinus noted. “The same exercise can become something very different depending on how it is framed.”
“Following the breath can be taught as relaxation, attention training, a clinical skill, a spiritual discipline, or a way to investigate the nature of the self,” she explained. “From the outside, the practice may look similar. From the inside, it may not be the same practice at all.”
“For me, meaning is not just a cultural ‘add-on’ to meditation. It shapes what people expect, how they interpret what happens during practice, how they deal with discomfort, and why they continue,” Stinus said. “This may be especially important for deconstructive practices, where the goal is not only to feel better, but to transform how we relate to thoughts, emotions, and the sense of ‘me.'”
“So I do not think the future question is simply whether meditation should be secular or spiritual,” she added. “The deeper question is: what kind of meaning framework helps people practice safely, sustain the practice, and make sense of what they experience? This is precisely the direction of some of my current work, so stay tuned.”
Exploring these meaning frameworks is a next step for the researchers. “My long-term goal is to continue studying what meditation can reveal about the mind, the self, and psychological suffering,” Stinus said. “We are still at a very early stage in understanding the transformative potential of meditation, especially when it comes to advanced meditation, deconstructive practices, and self-related processes.”
“At the same time, there is a very practical challenge that researchers need to take seriously: how do we help people actually start meditating, and keep going over time?” she asked. “It is not enough to show that meditation can be beneficial if it remains accessible only to a small minority of highly motivated people.”
“For me, the future is not only about showing that meditation ‘works.’ It is about developing more precise, realistic, and personalized meditation-based programs that people can sustain in real life,” Stinus concluded. “If we want meditation to have transformative and potentially liberating effects, we need to understand not only its mechanisms, but also how to make it compatible with the realities of people’s daily lives.”
The study, “Preventing Depression through Selflessness: Effects and Mechanisms of Attentional vs. Deconstructive Meditation in a Three-Arm Randomized Controlled Trial“, was authored by Céline Stinus and Sophie Berjot.
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DATE: July 11, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Letting go of a rigid self-image might be the secret to meditation’s mental health benefits
New research provides evidence that different types of meditation can effectively reduce symptoms of depression and feelings of threat to personal identity. The findings suggest that focusing attention on breathing and engaging in introspective self-inquiry both offer significant mental health benefits, although they operate through slightly different mental pathways. The research was published in the journal Mindfulness.
Depression involves rigid and negative ways of thinking about oneself and the world. A major factor in depression is feeling an identity threat, which refers to the perception that a person’s self-concept or self-esteem is being attacked or devalued by others.
Individuals who hold dysfunctional attitudes tend to view these perceived threats through a highly negative filter. Dysfunctional attitudes are maladaptive beliefs that people hold about themselves, such as thinking they are a complete failure if they make a single mistake at work. These rigid beliefs reinforce feelings of distress and worsen depressive symptoms over time.
The study was conducted as part of doctoral research by first author Céline Stinus, a psychology researcher at the University of Navarra in Spain. The research was completed under the supervision of her co-author, Professor Sophie Berjot from the University of Reims Champagne Ardenne.
“I came to this study through a simple question: what if vulnerability to depression is not only about negative thoughts or low mood, but also about the way we relate to ourselves?” Stinus explained to PsyPost. “My background is in clinical psychology, and I have long been interested in why some people experience their own self, their failures, emotions, identity, or life story, as something fragile, threatening, or constantly in need of protection.”
“At the same time, I became increasingly interested in contemplative practices that do not only aim to calm the mind, but to transform the way we experience the self,” Stinus continued. “This led me to deconstructive forms of meditation, which are still much less studied than attention-based practices. They are fascinating because they invite people to examine the sense of ‘me’ itself.”
In the study, the authors explore “selflessness” as a way to relieve psychological distress. “In this study, I use the term ‘selflessness’ to describe this more flexible relationship to the self, not the absence of a self, but a self that is less rigid, less defensive, and less constantly experienced as under threat,” Stinus explained. “For me, the central question became whether cultivating this kind of relationship to the self could be one pathway toward reducing vulnerability to depression.”
Meditation is not a single practice but rather a broad family of techniques designed to train the mind. The authors focused on two specific types of meditation: attentional and deconstructive. Attentional meditation involves focusing the mind on a specific object, like the rhythm of breathing.
Deconstructive meditation asks practitioners to actively question their thoughts and feelings. This process, often called self-inquiry, encourages people to observe a mental event and ask where it comes from or why they identify with it. While attentional meditation is common in modern clinical settings, deconstructive practices are much less studied by science.
“The main takeaway is that meditation is not just one thing. Different practices may train different psychological skills,” Stinus said. “Some practices, such as breath meditation or body scan, can help stabilize attention, calm the body, or regulate emotions.”
“Deconstructive meditation goes one step further by inviting people to look directly at the sense of ‘me’: the inner story of who we are, how we judge ourselves, and how we react when we fail, succeed, feel criticized, or compare ourselves to others,” Stinus noted. “This matters because vulnerability to depression is often not only about having negative thoughts, but also involve experiencing the self as fragile, inadequate, or constantly under threat.”
“Our findings suggest that deconstructive meditation may help loosen this rigid relationship to oneself, allowing people to relate to their thoughts, emotions, and identity with more flexibility and less self-criticism,” Stinus said. To test this, the researchers recruited 147 adult participants for the experiment. They screened the volunteers to exclude experienced meditators, individuals taking psychiatric medications, and people with existing clinical depression diagnoses.
They randomly assigned the eligible participants into three equal groups of 49 people each. One group practiced focused-attention meditation, the second practiced self-inquiry meditation, and the third served as a wait-list control group. Participants in the control group were simply told they were on a wait-list due to high enrollment.
The meditation programs lasted for four weeks. Participants in the two active groups attended a weekly online group session that lasted sixty minutes. The primary author led these sessions, which included guided practices and time for group discussion.
Participants were also asked to practice at home for twenty minutes a day, five days a week, using audio recordings provided in a digital brochure. The focused-attention group practiced observing their breath and performing body scans. The focused-attention participants also practiced a daily exercise called “Train Your Attention Muscle.”
This required them to notice when their mind started wandering to uncomfortable topics and to quickly redirect their focus back to their breath. The self-inquiry group practiced a slightly different daily exercise called “STOP, I Contemplate.” This self-inquiry exercise asked participants to pause during their day to observe a current thought or emotional narrative, instructing them to reflect on the origin of the thought and question its absolute truth.
To measure the effects, participants filled out extensive questionnaires before and after the four-week period. The data provides evidence that both meditation styles are broadly beneficial for mental health. Both the focused-attention group and the self-inquiry group experienced greater reductions in depressive symptoms compared to the wait-list group.
The authors found no significant difference between the two meditation styles in reducing depressive symptoms or identity threat. Both styles proved similarly effective for improving these specific outcomes. The focused-attention group experienced significantly greater reductions in dysfunctional attitudes than both the self-inquiry group and the control group.
During the process, some unexpected patterns emerged regarding participant comfort. “What struck me was the gap between what I expected people to find most useful and what they seemed to find most comfortable,” Stinus said. “I was personally very drawn to deconstructive practices because they target something we all struggle with in daily life: being caught in our thoughts, self-judgments, emotional reactions, and stories about who we are.”
“But many participants seemed more at ease with practices such as breath meditation or body scan, which are closer to the common image of meditation as calming down or reducing stress,” she added. “This points to an important misunderstanding about meditation. Meditation is often presented as a way to feel better or escape discomfort.”
“But some forms of meditation are not designed simply to make us comfortable,” Stinus explained. “They invite us to turn toward patterns that are usually automatic or avoided. That can be uncomfortable at first, but also deeply liberating, because it helps us see that we do not have to be so identified with every thought, emotion, or story about ourselves.”
The self-inquiry practice had unique effects on feelings of connection to the outside world. Exploratory analyses suggest that only the self-inquiry group showed significant increases in feeling connected to humanity and feeling connected to nature. This suggests that questioning the self might help people feel more bonded to their environment and peers.
The researchers used statistical models to see exactly which mental changes explained the drop in negative symptoms. For the focused-attention group, increased cognitive decentering primarily explained the drop in depressive symptoms and dysfunctional attitudes. In the self-inquiry group, increased feelings of connection to humanity helped explain the reduction in identity threat.
Readers should be cautious not to view one method as superior. “One potential misinterpretation would be to read the study as saying that one type of meditation is simply ‘better’ than another,” Stinus said. “I do not think this is the right conclusion. The goal was not to rank meditation practices, but to better understand their specific effects and mechanisms.”
“Different practices may serve different psychological functions,” Stinus continued. “When someone feels overwhelmed, anxious, or unable to stabilize attention, practices such as breath meditation or body scan may offer grounding and regulation. Deconstructive practices may be especially relevant when the central difficulty is being strongly identified with painful thoughts, self-judgments, or stories about who we are.”
“So I would not think of meditation practices as a hierarchy from basic to advanced, or from weak to powerful,” she noted. “I would think of them more as different tools that may be more or less appropriate depending on the person, the moment, and the psychological process we are trying to work with. In practice, the goal is probably not to choose one practice and discard the others, but to combine them in a more precise and personalized way.”
When interpreting the study’s impact, the context of the intervention matters. “Readers should keep in mind that psychological effects are never completely isolated,” Stinus explained. “Even in a randomized controlled trial, we are not studying a meditation technique in a vacuum.”
“People enter an intervention with their own history, expectations, emotional state, relationships, habits, and life context,” she added. “The structure of the program also matters: regular practice, guidance from an instructor, and sometimes sharing the experience with others can all contribute to change.”
“That said, I see the findings as meaningful,” Stinus continued. “Beyond the statistical effect sizes, this study is a preliminary step toward a different way of understanding and preventing depression. The results suggest that people at risk for depression may begin to become less identified with painful thoughts and more flexible in the way they relate to themselves.”
“This is clinically relevant because many people do not only struggle with difficult experiences, thoughts, emotions, social interactions, social roles, or memories, but with the feeling that these experiences define who they are,” Stinus said. “Meditation may therefore be a valuable preventive or complementary tool, not as a replacement for therapy, but as a way to support people in working with self-critical and threatening patterns in daily life.”
The study has several limitations that should be noted when interpreting the findings. The sample was predominantly female, which means the results might not perfectly represent how all people respond to these techniques. The authors also relied entirely on self-reported questionnaires, which can sometimes be influenced by a participant’s desire to give a good impression.
A high number of participants in the wait-list group dropped out of the study before the second assessment. This high dropout rate could potentially create statistical biases when comparing the active groups to the control group. The study also did not include a long-term follow-up assessment, leaving it unknown whether the mental health benefits would last months or years later.
The authors also suggest that the completely secular nature of the program might explain the unexpected results regarding dysfunctional attitudes. Deconstructive practices in traditional settings often rely on deep spiritual frameworks that were intentionally removed for this scientific trial. Without that spiritual context, the self-inquiry practice might lack some of the depth needed to alter deeply ingrained negative beliefs during a short four-week period.
“One thing I would add is that meditation is not only a method. It is also a worldview in action,” Stinus noted. “The same exercise can become something very different depending on how it is framed.”
“Following the breath can be taught as relaxation, attention training, a clinical skill, a spiritual discipline, or a way to investigate the nature of the self,” she explained. “From the outside, the practice may look similar. From the inside, it may not be the same practice at all.”
“For me, meaning is not just a cultural ‘add-on’ to meditation. It shapes what people expect, how they interpret what happens during practice, how they deal with discomfort, and why they continue,” Stinus said. “This may be especially important for deconstructive practices, where the goal is not only to feel better, but to transform how we relate to thoughts, emotions, and the sense of ‘me.'”
“So I do not think the future question is simply whether meditation should be secular or spiritual,” she added. “The deeper question is: what kind of meaning framework helps people practice safely, sustain the practice, and make sense of what they experience? This is precisely the direction of some of my current work, so stay tuned.”
Exploring these meaning frameworks is a next step for the researchers. “My long-term goal is to continue studying what meditation can reveal about the mind, the self, and psychological suffering,” Stinus said. “We are still at a very early stage in understanding the transformative potential of meditation, especially when it comes to advanced meditation, deconstructive practices, and self-related processes.”
“At the same time, there is a very practical challenge that researchers need to take seriously: how do we help people actually start meditating, and keep going over time?” she asked. “It is not enough to show that meditation can be beneficial if it remains accessible only to a small minority of highly motivated people.”
“For me, the future is not only about showing that meditation ‘works.’ It is about developing more precise, realistic, and personalized meditation-based programs that people can sustain in real life,” Stinus concluded. “If we want meditation to have transformative and potentially liberating effects, we need to understand not only its mechanisms, but also how to make it compatible with the realities of people’s daily lives.”
The study, “Preventing Depression through Selflessness: Effects and Mechanisms of Attentional vs. Deconstructive Meditation in a Three-Arm Randomized Controlled Trial“, was authored by Céline Stinus and Sophie Berjot.
-------------------------------------------------
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-
DATE: June 29, 2026 at 08:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Authoritarianism acts as a psychological bridge for dark personalities, study finds
URL: https://www.psypost.org/how-strict-authoritarian-beliefs-help-mask-dark-personality-traits/
People with antagonistic personality traits often express their self-centered tendencies through rigid, authoritarian political beliefs, which can act as a bridge to managing their self-control. A recent study suggests that these harsh personality characteristics rely on a strict adherence to authority and tradition to justify punishing others, rather than operating through a direct desire for social dominance. These findings were published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.
Psychological researchers have proposed that aggressive and prejudiced social attitudes stem from two main motivational pathways in a framework known as the dual process model of prejudice. This approach separates ideological motivations into two distinct trajectories. One path is driven by a preference for social hierarchy, while the other is driven by a need for social order.
The first pathway is characterized by a preference for group-based inequality and social status. Psychologists call this social dominance orientation. People who score high in this area view the world as a competitive arena where certain groups naturally deserve to hold power over others.
The second pathway centers on strict obedience to established authorities and traditional norms. This is referred to as right-wing authoritarianism. Individuals with these tendencies perceive the world as a dangerous place, reacting to perceived threats with moral absolutism and a desire to punish those who break the rules.
Both of these ideological pathways have been associated with aggressive personality profiles. Recent psychological frameworks have identified a unified core for these antagonistic characteristics, termed the dark factor of personality. This core represents a general tendency to maximize personal gains at the expense of others while justifying the resulting harm.
This dark core encompasses several well-known traits, including narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism. Narcissism involves an inflated sense of superiority, psychopathy entails low empathy and impulsivity, and sadism involves deriving pleasure from the suffering of others. Rather than operating independently, these traits manifest as different expressions of the same underlying disposition.
To understand how these dark traits translate into behavior, researchers examine self-regulatory processes like emotion regulation and self-control. Emotion regulation involves the ability to manage and respond to emotional experiences gracefully. Self-control is the capacity to override impulses to achieve long-term goals or adhere to social standards.
Psychologist Fernanda Otoni at the Universidade Tuiuti do Paraná and her colleagues set out to investigate how these elements connect. They designed a study to see if authoritarian beliefs act as a psychological bridge between antagonistic personalities and a person’s ability to regulate their emotions and impulses. Their goal was to integrate personality, ideology, and self-regulation into a single explanatory model.
The researchers recruited 498 adult participants from various regions of Brazil. The volunteers ranged in age from 18 to 71, with an average age of about 33. The group was relatively balanced in terms of gender, and participants represented a wide spectrum of political affiliations.
Each participant completed a series of psychological questionnaires designed to assess multiple dimensions of their personality and behavior. One survey measured the dark factor of personality, asking respondents to rate their agreement with statements reflecting callousness, deceitfulness, and vindictiveness. Other surveys measured their levels of right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation.
To evaluate self-regulation, the team used two additional scales. The first measured general self-control, capturing the respondents’ perceived ability to resist temptation and maintain discipline. The second assessed difficulties in emotion regulation, identifying issues such as emotional impulsivity and an inability to accept negative feelings.
The researchers analyzed the responses using a statistical technique called path analysis. This method allows scientists to examine the directional links between multiple different variables simultaneously. They looked specifically for indirect pathways, where authoritarian beliefs might connect a dark personality to specific self-regulatory abilities.
They found that the dark factor of personality was entirely connected to self-control through right-wing authoritarianism. In this sample, individuals with highly antagonistic dispositions reported stricter adherence to traditional authorities and a greater willingness to punish rule-breakers. This authoritarian rigidity, in turn, was associated with their reported levels of self-control.
The results suggest that self-control is not always an adaptive, positive force. In people with high levels of dispositional antagonism, the ability to control impulses might function as a strategic tool rather than a purely protective capacity. They might use disciplined rule-following and punitive authoritarian beliefs as a socially acceptable way to express their hostility.
A surprising pattern emerged regarding social dominance orientation. A desire for hierarchical group relations did not act as a bridge between the dark personality factor and self-regulation. The statistical models showed no mediating effect for this variable on either self-control or emotional difficulties.
This lack of a relationship might be explained by the specific cultural context in which the study took place. In historically unequal societies like Brazil, social hierarchies are often sustained by traditional institutions and ingrained cultural norms. In such environments, individuals might not need explicit, self-serving personality traits to endorse anti-egalitarian beliefs.
The study also revealed insights into how emotion regulation operates. The researchers noted that difficulties in managing emotions had a direct, inverse relationship with self-control. This connection persisted even when accounting for the dark personality factor and authoritarian ideologies.
These emotional deficits did not appear to drive adherence to right-wing authoritarianism or social dominance orientation. The association between ideological beliefs and emotional dysregulation was very weak. This challenges the assumption that authoritarian individuals simply lack the capacity to cope with negative emotions.
Instead, the data support the idea that emotional regulation and self-control operate as distinct, relatively independent domains. People with maladaptive regulatory strategies, such as constantly suppressing their feelings, often struggle to maintain basic self-control. This regulatory failure seems to happen apart from their political or social worldviews.
The researchers detailed a few limitations to their investigation. Because the data came from self-reported questionnaires, the responses might be influenced by social desirability bias. Participants might have altered their answers to appear more favorable, especially regarding sensitive topics like prejudice and aggression.
The study relied on observational data gathered at a single point in time. This design means the results cannot prove that a dark personality alters someone’s authoritarian beliefs or diminishes their self-control. The associations only highlight how these psychological traits tend to cluster together in the population.
The statistical model used by the research team explained only a modest amount of the variation in the participants’ responses. This indicates that other unmeasured factors likely play a role in shaping how people regulate their emotions and form ideological beliefs. Socioeconomic status, childhood environments, and other personality traits might fill in the missing pieces.
Future investigations could expand on this framework by incorporating different cultural backgrounds and measures of social inequality. Including data that tracks individuals over many years would also help clarify the developmental timeline of these traits. Expanding psychological research beyond Western, industrialized populations remains an essential goal for the broader scientific community.
The study, “The dark core and the dual process of prejudice: When self-control and emotional dysregulation serve antagonistic ends,” was authored by Fernanda Otoni, Ariela Raíssa Lima-Costa, Antônio Silvério da Rocha Neto, Victória Sobreira Gonçalves, Ligia Ziegler Samuel, and Bruno Bonfá-Araujo.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/how-strict-authoritarian-beliefs-help-mask-dark-personality-traits/
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-
DATE: June 29, 2026 at 08:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Authoritarianism acts as a psychological bridge for dark personalities, study finds
URL: https://www.psypost.org/how-strict-authoritarian-beliefs-help-mask-dark-personality-traits/
People with antagonistic personality traits often express their self-centered tendencies through rigid, authoritarian political beliefs, which can act as a bridge to managing their self-control. A recent study suggests that these harsh personality characteristics rely on a strict adherence to authority and tradition to justify punishing others, rather than operating through a direct desire for social dominance. These findings were published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.
Psychological researchers have proposed that aggressive and prejudiced social attitudes stem from two main motivational pathways in a framework known as the dual process model of prejudice. This approach separates ideological motivations into two distinct trajectories. One path is driven by a preference for social hierarchy, while the other is driven by a need for social order.
The first pathway is characterized by a preference for group-based inequality and social status. Psychologists call this social dominance orientation. People who score high in this area view the world as a competitive arena where certain groups naturally deserve to hold power over others.
The second pathway centers on strict obedience to established authorities and traditional norms. This is referred to as right-wing authoritarianism. Individuals with these tendencies perceive the world as a dangerous place, reacting to perceived threats with moral absolutism and a desire to punish those who break the rules.
Both of these ideological pathways have been associated with aggressive personality profiles. Recent psychological frameworks have identified a unified core for these antagonistic characteristics, termed the dark factor of personality. This core represents a general tendency to maximize personal gains at the expense of others while justifying the resulting harm.
This dark core encompasses several well-known traits, including narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism. Narcissism involves an inflated sense of superiority, psychopathy entails low empathy and impulsivity, and sadism involves deriving pleasure from the suffering of others. Rather than operating independently, these traits manifest as different expressions of the same underlying disposition.
To understand how these dark traits translate into behavior, researchers examine self-regulatory processes like emotion regulation and self-control. Emotion regulation involves the ability to manage and respond to emotional experiences gracefully. Self-control is the capacity to override impulses to achieve long-term goals or adhere to social standards.
Psychologist Fernanda Otoni at the Universidade Tuiuti do Paraná and her colleagues set out to investigate how these elements connect. They designed a study to see if authoritarian beliefs act as a psychological bridge between antagonistic personalities and a person’s ability to regulate their emotions and impulses. Their goal was to integrate personality, ideology, and self-regulation into a single explanatory model.
The researchers recruited 498 adult participants from various regions of Brazil. The volunteers ranged in age from 18 to 71, with an average age of about 33. The group was relatively balanced in terms of gender, and participants represented a wide spectrum of political affiliations.
Each participant completed a series of psychological questionnaires designed to assess multiple dimensions of their personality and behavior. One survey measured the dark factor of personality, asking respondents to rate their agreement with statements reflecting callousness, deceitfulness, and vindictiveness. Other surveys measured their levels of right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation.
To evaluate self-regulation, the team used two additional scales. The first measured general self-control, capturing the respondents’ perceived ability to resist temptation and maintain discipline. The second assessed difficulties in emotion regulation, identifying issues such as emotional impulsivity and an inability to accept negative feelings.
The researchers analyzed the responses using a statistical technique called path analysis. This method allows scientists to examine the directional links between multiple different variables simultaneously. They looked specifically for indirect pathways, where authoritarian beliefs might connect a dark personality to specific self-regulatory abilities.
They found that the dark factor of personality was entirely connected to self-control through right-wing authoritarianism. In this sample, individuals with highly antagonistic dispositions reported stricter adherence to traditional authorities and a greater willingness to punish rule-breakers. This authoritarian rigidity, in turn, was associated with their reported levels of self-control.
The results suggest that self-control is not always an adaptive, positive force. In people with high levels of dispositional antagonism, the ability to control impulses might function as a strategic tool rather than a purely protective capacity. They might use disciplined rule-following and punitive authoritarian beliefs as a socially acceptable way to express their hostility.
A surprising pattern emerged regarding social dominance orientation. A desire for hierarchical group relations did not act as a bridge between the dark personality factor and self-regulation. The statistical models showed no mediating effect for this variable on either self-control or emotional difficulties.
This lack of a relationship might be explained by the specific cultural context in which the study took place. In historically unequal societies like Brazil, social hierarchies are often sustained by traditional institutions and ingrained cultural norms. In such environments, individuals might not need explicit, self-serving personality traits to endorse anti-egalitarian beliefs.
The study also revealed insights into how emotion regulation operates. The researchers noted that difficulties in managing emotions had a direct, inverse relationship with self-control. This connection persisted even when accounting for the dark personality factor and authoritarian ideologies.
These emotional deficits did not appear to drive adherence to right-wing authoritarianism or social dominance orientation. The association between ideological beliefs and emotional dysregulation was very weak. This challenges the assumption that authoritarian individuals simply lack the capacity to cope with negative emotions.
Instead, the data support the idea that emotional regulation and self-control operate as distinct, relatively independent domains. People with maladaptive regulatory strategies, such as constantly suppressing their feelings, often struggle to maintain basic self-control. This regulatory failure seems to happen apart from their political or social worldviews.
The researchers detailed a few limitations to their investigation. Because the data came from self-reported questionnaires, the responses might be influenced by social desirability bias. Participants might have altered their answers to appear more favorable, especially regarding sensitive topics like prejudice and aggression.
The study relied on observational data gathered at a single point in time. This design means the results cannot prove that a dark personality alters someone’s authoritarian beliefs or diminishes their self-control. The associations only highlight how these psychological traits tend to cluster together in the population.
The statistical model used by the research team explained only a modest amount of the variation in the participants’ responses. This indicates that other unmeasured factors likely play a role in shaping how people regulate their emotions and form ideological beliefs. Socioeconomic status, childhood environments, and other personality traits might fill in the missing pieces.
Future investigations could expand on this framework by incorporating different cultural backgrounds and measures of social inequality. Including data that tracks individuals over many years would also help clarify the developmental timeline of these traits. Expanding psychological research beyond Western, industrialized populations remains an essential goal for the broader scientific community.
The study, “The dark core and the dual process of prejudice: When self-control and emotional dysregulation serve antagonistic ends,” was authored by Fernanda Otoni, Ariela Raíssa Lima-Costa, Antônio Silvério da Rocha Neto, Victória Sobreira Gonçalves, Ligia Ziegler Samuel, and Bruno Bonfá-Araujo.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/how-strict-authoritarian-beliefs-help-mask-dark-personality-traits/
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