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To benefit from information provided by other people, people must be somewhat credulous. However, credulity entails risks. The optimal level of credulity depends on the relative costs of believing misinformation and failing to attend to accurate information. When information concerns hazards, erroneous incredulity is often more costly than erroneous credulity, given that disregarding accurate warnings is more harmful than adopting unnecessary precautions. Because no equivalent asymmetry exists for information concerning benefits, people should generally be more credulous of hazard information than of benefit information. This adaptive negatively biased credulity is linked to negativity bias in general and is more prominent among people who believe the world to be more dangerous. Because both threat sensitivity and beliefs about the dangerousness of the world differ between conservatives and liberals, we predicted that conservatism would positively correlate with negatively biased credulity. Two online studies of Americans supported this prediction, potentially illuminating how politicians' alarmist claims affect different portions of the electorate.

Young children readily act on information from adults, setting aside their own prior convictions and even continuing to trust informants who make claims that are manifestly false. Such credulity is consistent with a long-standing philosophical and scientific conception of young children as prone to indiscriminate trust. Against this conception, we argue that children trust some informants more than others. In particular, they use two major heuristics. First, they keep track of the history of potential informants. Faced with conflicting claims, they endorse claims made by someone who has provided reliable care or reliable information in the past. Second, they monitor the cultural standing of potential informants. Faced with conflicting claims, children endorse claims made by someone who belongs to a consensus and whose behaviour abides by, rather than deviating from, the norms of their group. The first heuristic is likely to promote receptivity to information offered by familiar caregivers, whereas the second heuristic is likely to promote a broader receptivity to informants from the same culture.

The present study investigates the association between Fear of Missing Out (FoMO) and Problematic Internet Use (PIU) in a sample of 358 cisgender emerging adults (74.58% females assigned at birth; Mage = 25.02, SD = 2.60; age range: 18–29 years), with a specific focus on the roles of various stances of Epistemic Trust, including Trust, Mistrust, and Credulity. The aim is to explore the complexities of these relationships and their implications for the psychological well-being of this population. We computed a mediation model to examine the relationships among PIU as the dependent variable, FoMO as the predictor, and Epistemic Trust, Mistrust, and Credulity as the mediating factors. Covariates such as age, gender, and sexual orientation were also considered in the analysis. The results revealed significant indirect effects for both Mistrust and Credulity. Specifically, higher levels of FoMO were associated with increased Mistrust and Credulity, leading to greater PIU. In contrast, the indirect effect of Trust was not significant. Also, FoMO had a direct effect on PIU. The results highlight the importance of considering Mistrust and Credulity as potential risk factors for Internet addiction in emerging adults. These findings have practical implications for clinical practice, psychological assessment, and intervention strategies, emphasizing the need to address FoMO and its associated vulnerabilities within different therapeutic settings. By doing so, mental health professionals can better support the psychological well-being of emerging adults and assist them in navigating the challenges inherent to this crucial developmental stage.

This article explores the implications of non-ideal theorising for the problem of evil. The critique of ideal theory – which has gained increased attention in several philosophical sub-disciplines during recent years – states that analytic philosophers tend to rely on overly idealised conditions, to the point of being completely unrealistic, in their theorising. To investigate if this charge holds merit in the philosophy of religion, I apply a non-ideal methodology to one traditional area of philosophy of religion – the problem of evil. Here, Richard Swinburne’s theodicy constitutes a sample of how the problem of evil is typically approached in mainstream philosophy of religion. Additionally, Swinburne’s Principle of Credulity will, in relation to his theodicy, be interrogated as well. Applying non-ideal theorising, I find that Swinburne’s theorisation relies on idealised cases and presupposes ideal conditions, while overlooking non-ideal realities. Turning to epistemic injustice and epistemology of ignorance, I find that Swinburne assumes ideal epistemological conditions in both inter-agent communication (testimony), and in collective cognition. After examining the implications of such idealisations, I find that Swinburne’s idealisations abstract away non-ideal factors which are relevant for his theories, concluding that Swinburne displays tendencies typical of ideal theorising.

Introduction Epistemic trust, or trust in transmitted knowledge, has been proposed as a critical factor in psychopathology and psychotherapy. This study aimed at evaluating the psychometric properties of the Epistemic Trust, Mistrust, and Credulity Questionnaire (ETMCQ) in Iran. Method Data were collected from 906 participants. Along with the ETMCQ, measures of mentalizing, mindfulness, perspective‐taking, attachment, emotion dysregulation, and borderline personality disorder were administered. Confirmatory factor analysis and exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM) were used to determine factorial structure. Results The ESEM model showed an acceptable fit and outperformed the confirmatory model. A 14‐item version of the ETMCQ was retained after examining item performance. Our findings also established criterion‐related validity for mistrust and credulity, an acceptable internal consistency for credulity, discriminant power for mistrust and credulity in detecting positive screens for borderline personality disorder, and measurement invariance across sexes. Conclusion This study provides evidence for the cross‐cultural applicability of the ETMCQ. Nonetheless, the validity of the trust and internal consistency of the mistrust subscale require particular attention in future research.   

A wide-ranging argument by a renowned anthropologist that the capacity to believe is what makes us human Why are so many humans religious? Why do we daydream, imagine, and hope? Philosophers, theologians, social scientists, and historians have offered explanations for centuries, but their accounts often ignore or even avoid human evolution. Evolutionary scientists answer with proposals for why ritual, religion, and faith make sense as adaptations to past challenges or as by-products of our hyper-complex cognitive capacities. But what if the focus on religion is too narrow? Renowned anthropologist Agustín Fuentes argues that the capacity to be religious is actually a small part of a larger and deeper human capacity to believe. Why believe in religion, economies, love? A fascinating intervention into some of the most common misconceptions about human nature, this book employs evolutionary, neurobiological, and anthropological evidence to argue that belief-the ability to commit passionately and wholeheartedly to an idea-is central to the human way of being in the world.

Objective : to reveal the essence and significance of the historical experience of interdisciplinary study of crime and its use in modern conditions of scientific support of crime prevention. Methods : dialectical method and system-synergetic approach, the method of retrospection in the study and evaluation of historical facts of the complex development of scientific directions in the legal doctrine of crime and punishment; dogmatic and empirical methods determining the specifics of scientific approaches to the general subject of research, their critical analysis; comparative historical assessment of the integration of criminal-legal sciences at various stages of accumulation and development of their scientific potential; prognostic assessment of the preventive capabilities of the criminal-legal sciences within the frameworks of 5.1.4 scientific major. Results : in modern criminal jurisprudence, there are ambiguous research approaches to the perception and evaluation of some scientific provisions. On the one hand, in retrospection, the phenomena are observed which are unproductive in relation to science or generally useless for it (due to uncriticism or formalism). On the other hand, retrospection, being methodologically justified, serves the scientific perspective, in particular, the development of associative links of criminal-legal sciences, and the activation of the historically determined general scientific function of criminology. These processes, if scientifically optimized, have the prospect of bringing the energies of criminal-legal sciences and relevant practices to a resultant effect, i.e. to a well-coordinated system of combating crime. This is what the aspirations of the founders of the new legal science of crime are aimed at. Scientific novelty : the possibilities are substantiated of developing a number of aspects of interdisciplinary (within the framework of the 5.1.4 scientific major) research of crime regularities, of developing and implementing special measures of counteraction in the parameters of criminological and political support. A retrospective analysis of some criminological provisions in their historical connections initiates a deeper understanding of the painful issues that are covered by the category of “crime” (in the individual and cumulative meanings of this term). Initially, there were three main directions of theoretical and applied legal doctrine about crime in the scientific world of criminal justice: dogmatic-legal, criminological-legal and political-legal. Analytical reflections in the parameters of retrospection lead to the comprehension of a very complex nature of the evolution of scientific thought. Practical significance : the theoretical provisions may equip practice; namely, they form a higher and more sustainable level of criminological, or rather, criminological-political thinking, without which effective criminal-legal (legislative, law enforcement) practice is impossible.

Organizational security assurance is a complex and multi-dimensional task. One of the biggest threats to an organization is the credulity of phishing attacks for its employees. To prevent attacks, employees must maintain cyber security hygiene and increase their awareness of the cyberattack landscape. In this paper, we investigate how selected Lithuanian education system employees are vulnerable to spear-phishing attacks. In various education organizations, spear-phishing attacks were imitated, and user responses to received emails were monitored and analyzed. Each organization needs a different attention because employee behavior varies. Employees’ reaction time dimension is explored in the research. Based on these results, it appears that the organization has no time for delayed responses. Employees in the education system are highly affected by spear-phishing attacks and need less than one minute to provide attacker-requested data. This illustrates that automated e-mail filtering systems are a key element in the fight against these kinds of attacks.