Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Just how gullible are you?
Visit the Museum of Hoaxes (www.museumofhoaxes) and take one of the "hoax photo tests" or one of the "gullibility tests." You will find the links for them in the second row of links at the top of the site's home page. Report your score and comment on: a) the significance and implications of your performance on the test, or b) test items you found interesting, confounding, or even that you disagree with the site's answer for.
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16 comments:
Well, I took all the photo tests, but I cannot remember my combined score. I do know that I got a 70% on the gullibility test. Apparently sharks can get cancer even though they are rarely exposed radiation, turtles don't die of old age, and the speed of light in a super-cooled medium can be reduced to near zero. The first and third ones actually have quite logical explanations. I really should have gotten the one about light right, since I read in physics that the speed of light is slower when it has to travel through a medium such as air or water. The gravity one at the end was easy though. Everyone should know that the earth is bulged at the equator and thus the gravitational force at the poles would be slightly stronger due to F=(G*M*m)/(r^2). The one I have a hard time believing is that turtles and fish don't die of old age. It is not possible that a living organism can exist forever if it protects itself from injury or disease. Whenever cells split in the process of mitosis, the DNA has to be replicated. It is very unlikely that DNA can be replicated perfectly every single time, since it contains billions of base pairs that contain dozens of molecules. Eventually, the number of mutations in the DNA will reach a critical level or an important base pair that cannot be repaired will mutate and cause a cancerous growth. In order to avoid this process from happening, the cells of fish and turtles would have to never split once reaching maturity, and cells can't live forever any better than people do. I'll do some more research into this topic, as there may be something I am not considering, but I will certainly not just accept a fact I don't believe just because a website says it is true.
On the hoax photo tests, I scored a 7, 6, 7 and 7. I do not believe my performance on the test really has any implications, at least not on my gullibility that is. This is due to the way I took the tests. Rather than look at how much I believed in that these things could happen, I was more looking for how easy it looks like it is to digitally edit these things in. I simply found it more logical to look at to determine that than to toss and turn the viability of the story behind them in my head.
If these tests showed anything, it's that I trust more in my preconceptions of technology, due to experience with it, than my preconceptions of random facts of life. I have more experience with photo-editing technology than I do with the occurrences portrayed. And that experience of "knowing how" I would suppose is more reliable than evidence-less conceptions of "knowing that" something can or can't happen.
Yay for somewhat incoherence... :/
I think its difficult to believe the results of these tests because the questions in the gullibility test can be subjunctive because lets use the example that I said false on some of the questions when the "correct" answer was actually false...what does that mean? That I am gullible in the way that I thought something true was false..no it would mean that I didn't have the correct knowledge to formulate the correct response to the question, not that I am gullible. I don't agree with the setup in the gullibility test, so I can't bring myself to believe in what the test concludes about my gullibility. Now on the other hand the hoax picture tests have a strong enough foundation on the setup that I can believe in their answers to their questions. Even though these four picture tests only minimally test gullibility on how we picture other people to behave and what we believe to be real in the world, I still think that these four tests are more reliable and believable to test our gullibility than that of the gullibility test.
After taking the gullibility tests, my scores were 7 and 8. It was easier to established a false statement from a true one, then it was to find the difference between a real and a hoax image. My scores from the hoax photo tests were 6,8,5,5. Slightly lower, because as visual human beings, we seem to instantly believe our eyes. As for the gullibility test, I was able to reason and find the correct answer by knowing a little bit of the history behind the question. So I was able to rule out what it couldn't be, therefore establishing the correct answer. The only times I knew that a picture was a hoax, was when it seemed physically impossible, although I forgot to keep in mind that technology has the capability to morph and create unrealistic representation of images. The ones I found most interesting were the occurrences within nature, such as the hurricanes, or all the houses being wiped out except one, or the Hubble Space Telescope showing a gassy Nebula that appears to have its middle finger raised, probably because I know so little about the nature occurrences in this world. And although my knowledge was limited, it seems interesting that I would revoke a picture that I thought was unrealistic, before I would except it as being real. Telling me a little about the type of person I am, I learned that I am a skeptic of everything that seems to question my beliefs and previous knowledge. It is a stubborn trait, which I am not proud of, but it happens to also work for my advantage and cause to be persistent and constantly curiously of the unknown.
I took all four of the "hoax photo tests" and scored 4,5,9,8. I don't think these really reflect your gullibility. After the first two tests I figured out what to look for that would show it was fake. Most of them I probably would not have believed out of context, which is another thing, I was on my gaurd for somehting to be wrong with the pictures, that already messes up the test to see if you're really gullible. And personally, I would believe if Bush tried reading an elementary book upside down. ;)
I also took the "gullibility test" and I'm not really sure about some answers. They say that lemmings don't hurl themselves off of cliffs in mass suicide but my biology teacher said they occasionally do. Who's right? A site that may not be realiable or my science teacher who is supposed to have all the facts...?
Ok, so I took the gullibility tests and I scored 7/10. Personally, I do agree with Benitez that it seems like everything should be able to die from old age. Eventually the cells would get old or the DNA would mutate. But I suppose the doctors could label that a "disease", which is yet another example of language being used according to the individual's perspective. I'll admit I fell for the old-age Ecuadorian town question, even though I shouldn't have, because I think they just had something about people in Japan living the longest on the news...I don't think the test really revealed anything new to me, except that it revealed my tendency to think things are true just because they're possible. (like the monkey chain) But just knowing it could be done is not sufficient evidence for something to be true. I also thing that the test needs to be edited to have more "evidence" for each question in order to really determine someone's propensity to believe something without investigating the claim. Those who are gullible (as I sometimes am) reveal that after someone tells them a compelling but fake argument.
I took both, because I did so poorly on the photo test that I took the gullibility test to prove that I'm not stupid. I don't think the photo hoax test necessarily stands as a good test of whether or not one is gullible. I scored pretty well on the 'gullibility' test, but miserably failed the photo hoax test. I think the discrepancy could be partly because the photo test isn't really testing your gullibility (or belief, since gullibility is hard to type), but is really testing sense perception. It's not so much testing whether or not you believe in the validity of the image, as whether or not you can see where it's been altered.
More thoughts.
Brett is mostly right about the gullibility test. It does test your ability to match the correct answer to the statement. However, it works on the premise that you have heard these comments before and already formed an opinion about them. most of them were pretty familiar- even if you had never heard any of them before, we talked about whether or not Thomas Crapper invented the toilet in class. The other myths were similar to that. Most of them had comments like "the story was developed or added to" by someone in the 60's or 70's, which
means they're probably familiar to us by now. Given that, the test becomes an effective way to test your gullibility by testing what you believe.
sweet...I had another thought about this working on biology. What exactly is the test trying to measure? Ok, gullibility. Is that how readily you believe in something? Let's assume that that's our working definition: the ease with which someone accepts a false statement as true. This would lead to an analysis of how they formulate their belief. If gullible people easily accept untrue propositions, that would imply that they use faulty reasoning. James recently was tricked into checking the ceiling to see if gullible was written up there....(which it wasn't). however, he reaches knowledge more through logic than through any other way of knowing. how, then, is he so gullible? Gullible people strike me as being extraordinarily trusting. Maybe the problem them isn't with how they obtain beliefs through logic, but with their emotion.
Well, I found the test very interesting. I received a 60% gulability on the test. I guess this is interesting, but I dont find it significant for many reasons.
First, the test itself may be flawed. From taking these tests, it got me wondering: How do you truly measure gulability? For example, one person might think that it is perfectly logical to click on a "you just won..." advertisement on the internet because of the fact that it says "free." The other person might say that only a gulable person would do that.
The point I'm trying to make is that we all have different opinions as to what gulable is. For that reason alone, I regard this survey thing as nothing short of insignificant, due to the fact that you cannot truly have a "gulability standard."
In addition, I think that it is important to note that there is a certain grey area in terms of gulability. One occurance of this might be the example I gave earlier about the website popups. Perhaps it might take a gulable person to believe that they won something off of the internet for no reason at all, but perhaps the reason that person thought that was because they had entered their name into a drawing on an on-line gambling sight? All of the sudden, that person might have had a justified reason for believing they won something. Gulability is something that cannot be measured objectively, as Brett said, but rather only on a subjective, case by case, basis.
BECAUSE YOU HAVE STOPPED POSTING FOR THE BUSH- FALSE PRETENSE BLOG I WILL LEAVE A DOUBLE POSTING HERE NOW. As far as the whole deal about Bush leading us into war under 'false pretenses' it is a complete matter of perspective. Those people who think that the war was a good thing and that we should continue it are going to be less likely to say that they were lead to war under false pretenses than a avid anti war person. Regardless of the fact, either way, if we did end up going to war on false pretenses that would mean that the overall foundation of the war was weak from the very beginning. This is difficult for many Americans because after the terrorist attacks, everyone was happy to jump on the war bandwagon, without looking into it much. The reason that this whole false-pretense concept angers people is that people feel that they have been taken advantage of. Mike got into an interesting argument. What it boils down to, however is the idea that only the TRUTH can be correct. Justifications do not directly imply truth. Sure, before we invaded Iraq was it true that we had a pretty good hunch of what was going on in Iraq, YES WE DID. However, we did not know it with 100 percent certainty so we took a risk that has split the nation's public opinion in two. What is false is false, and if the reasons that were used to coerce an invasion were not genuine, the public should know it. Basically, what the white house is doing is improperly applying the theory of knowledge. They are arguing that if you think you know something, than you know it. This is obviously not true as there are many people in this world who think they know an answer to a test but select the incorrect answer. The test taker cant argue at the teacher that "when i took the test I thought I was selecting the right answer" and "I was justified in giving that answer, you should give me some points" A WRONG ANSWER IS A WRONG ANSWER and there is no gray area about it. Knowledge must be justified TRUE belief. The truth is the key component that kept us from "knowing" about nuclear weapons and al-queada in Iraq.
I agree with Bret the results of these gullibility tests are rather sketchy. Quite honestly i think alot of the pictures looked photoshoped and exaggerated almost as if they were trying to trick you into thinking that most of these are fake.
On the other hand these tests were based off of your knowledge of pop culture and had very little to do with what evidence was behind the pictures or what led the viewer to believe it was fake or true. Logically one would think that the picture with the car and the huge load were fake,how can a car so little support so much weight?
I did not get very good scores, nor do I really care. All of these tests measure more of our cultural bias than our ability to distinguish between real and fake. I found myself second guessing every answer that I made, because every question that is being presented is presented in a manner that is meant to be decieving. All of the pictures are extremely our of the ordinary. Many of these events could happen without photoshop, but on the other hand all of the gullability pictures could have been made in photoshop. Its just a matter of guessing which ones just happened to not be done on photoshop. The whole exercise was written with deception in mind to make people think that they are gullible. This is a false name for this test as gullability is atleast a little more complex than the test would be. It would take a much more complex system to calculate the real-life gullability of a person. This was more of a technology knowledge test- to determine what was done on photoshop or not.
I got 5 answers wrong and 5 answers right. I'm not surprised on some of the questions that I got wrong that I believed might be false. I believe the fact that cockroaches can survive a month after their head has been chopped off, but there were some that I got wrong that I must simply just disagree with. The lemming question in particular. I know for a fact that Lemmings will follow each other in a large mass, even to the death. In IB bio SL this year we watched a program on how huge packs of little lemmings will follow the leader of the pack ANYWHERE that lead lemming goes. The pack will cross any river, jump any cliff or climb any mountain until they get to the Ocean, and when they reach the ocean (if they don't die in MASS SUICIDE OFF A CLIFF) they will keep swimming out to see till they die of exhaustion and drown. Because of this being "false" on that test, I must question the whole tests validity...
I got a 70% on the history culture and 60% on science and nature. Personally the idea of a gullibility test to me is a test which is able to assess the depth at which you accept justifications for facts. Since there is now way to determine how much you were told about these facts it actually has nothing to do with how gullible you are, but rather if you accepted what they think is true as the truth or not. I also had a hard time believing that turtles NEVER die of old age; because we learned in biology that all cells have an age signature on them and that as each time DNA is replicated it is actually containing small flaws in it due to numerous reasons such as radiation. In theory, if the abnormal wave forms and energies that we are exposed to were filtered through something, such as the antideluvian canopy (a vapor canopy that may have existed around the earth before the flood). I will admit that I believed that most people thought the world was flat in 1492 because I remember being taught that they believed that one might sail off the edge of the earth. I think that if we are going to claim that these tests have weight in judging our capacity in some way, that the only significant thing that can be stated is that you were ignorant or that your beliefs aren't consistent with the evidence presented by the site's source.
My scores were 6, 7, 5, and 5. What this told me is that I am fairly gullible with images that I see, however I did kind of randomly guess on a few of them because I was unsure. This shows how technology has advanced so far that we are able to change and create something that did not happen to something that did whether it be a joke or changing something to make it look better. This was done quite a bit with Stalin and Lennon in Soviet Russia with many of the photos that were taken; they changed the photos by either tasking a lot of people out who betrayed the government or putting a picture with both Stalin and Lennon together so there would be a good picture with both of them for use of political gain.
Also there is the fact that so many things have happened in the world today that it is hard to tell whether something is true or false. Sometimes we believe images to be true even though we know that they are not because we either need to have something out of the ordinary once in a while or because it helps you prove or disprove a point.
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