Can you trust survey responses?

March 29, 2025

Self-reporting on surveys seems ridiculously unreliable. People can lie or may not pay attention. People misremember things. People often lack self-insight. And YET, self-reporting fairly often works remarkably well in measuring things. Here are some examples: (1) In a large study we ran, IQ (measured by performance on intelligence tasks) had a strong correlation with self-reported (remembered) performance on the math portion of the SAT exam (r=0.61, n=714), which most participants would hav...

Five types of people who spread misinformation

March 22, 2025

People often assume that public figures who spread false information are just “liars.” Still, I think it’s more accurate and useful to realize there are at least five distinct and important types of misinformation spreaders: 1) Narcissistic deceivers: they don’t track or even consider whether what they are saying is true; they say what feels good to them. This relates to what philosophers call “bullshitting” (as opposed to “lying”). Some well-known politicians fall into this camp. 2) P...