The goal of the current study was to explore the possible effect of a short mindfulness meditation on decreasing a tendency for miserly processing and degree of myside bias. The author ś sample consisted of 76 students that were assigned into three groups: one with short mindfulness intervention and two control groups (one was given a lecture on cognitive biases and second group was given mind-wandering instruction). The groups did not significantly differ in any of the measured variables (with one minor exception). The results indicate that short-term mindfulness induction was unsuccessful in changing the proclivity for cognitive biases, contrary to what the author predicted.
Current research on bullshit has shifted its focus from the recipient of bullshit to its producer; this trend being reflected in the new Bullshitting frequency scale (Littrell et al., 2021) measuring persuasive and evasive bullshitting. The aim of our study was to validate the scale for the Slovak population and to examine the relationship between persuasive and evasive bullshitting behaviour, overconfidence and myside bias in the context of the topic of migration. Six hundred and sixty-six Slovak adults (52.7% men, Mage = 41.84) participated in an online study. The two-factor structure of BFS was confirmed. The results showed that people high in persuasive bullshitting (“persuasive bullshitters”), after controlling for evasive bullshitting, felt they had more knowledge about migration, but they also showed more myside bias. Similarly, people high in evasive bullshitting (“evasive bullshitters”), after controlling for persuasive bullshitting, felt they had less knowledge about migration and tended to underestimate their knowledge. Contrary to our expectations, correlation between overconfidence and persuasive bullshitting disappeared when evasive bullshitting was controlled for, and it seems that the negative correlation was caused by evasive bullshitters being underconfident. Our results further expand the knowledge about cognitive characteristics of bullshitters and support the distinction between the two kinds of bullshitting behaviour, which has implications for political debates as well.
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