Bence Bago

Bence Bago is a behavioral scientist and experimental psychologist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse. His research focuses on the psychological underpinnings of belief formation, reasoning under constraints, and susceptibility to misinformation. He collaborates extensively with David Rand and Gordon Pennycook on understanding how deliberation and analytical thinking affect people's ability to discern true from false information.

Sources in this wiki

• Pennycook, Bago & McPhetres (2022) — Science beliefs, political ideology, and cognitive sophistication — Tests four competing accounts of science belief formation across diverse topics; finds knowledge and analytic thinking explain more variance than political ideology; cognitive sophistication does not amplify polarization on climate change.
• Rosenzweig, Bago, Berinsky, Rand & Gabriel (2021) — Happiness and surprise are associated with worse truth discernment of COVID-19 headlines among social media users in Nigeria — Survey of 1,341 Nigerian Facebook users showing happiness and surprise emotions are associated with worse discernment of COVID-19 misinformation and greater sharing of false headlines.
• Pennycook, McPhetres, Bago & Rand (2021) — Beliefs about COVID-19 in Canada, the U.K., and the U.S.A.: A novel test of political polarization and motivated reasoning — Cross-country survey showing political polarization of COVID-19 beliefs is strongest in the U.S., driven by differential media trust; cognitive sophistication predicts accuracy but not reduced polarization.
• Bago, Rand & Pennycook (2022) — Does deliberation decrease belief in conspiracies? — Two large experiments (N=1,028 and N=1,000) testing whether deliberation reduces conspiracy belief; finds no effect for well-known conspiracies but nuanced effects for lesser-known ones, with deliberation only helping people at extremes of conspiracy mindset, not those with intermediate beliefs.
• Bago et al. (2022) — Emotion may predict susceptibility to fake news but emotion regulation does not seem to help — Four-study examination of whether emotions drive false-headline belief and whether emotion regulation techniques improve accuracy; finds emotions (except anger) predict worse truth discernment, but emotion regulation interventions do not improve performance.
• Bago, Rand & Pennycook (2023) — Reasoning about climate change — Tests whether deliberation exacerbates political bias in climate argument evaluation; finds no support for motivated System 2 reasoning, instead showing deliberation increases coherence between judgments and prior beliefs regardless of partisanship.
• Bago, Rand & Pennycook (2020) — Fake news, fast and slow: Deliberation reduces belief in false (but not true) news headlines — Tests competing theories of how deliberation affects fake news belief using a two-response paradigm; finds deliberation corrects intuitive false-headline belief without increasing partisan bias, supporting the classical reasoning account over motivated-reasoning theory.

Topics

• fake-news, misinformation, cognitive-reasoning, psychology-of-belief

Notes

Frequent collaborator with the Pennycook-Rand group on dual-process theories of misinformation susceptibility and interventions.