Notice! Notice! This midweek mini was recorded several months ago and may not be up to date with current events.

For fresh minisode uploads with every episode, head to patreon.com slash Chalumaddy pod you know what I Hello, hello, Shulimanauton, welcome.

Hey, everyone.

It's minisote. It's minisote, Tom. Are you ready to have a minisode? Well, hello there. Minisot 249. What do you got? Jesse, you had to go find what you found. No, I, yeah, no, I had a whole, I have a whole thing for you guys. I hope you're ready.

It's fascinating.

So I found this late at night when I was doing my should have been sleeping, but I was on Reddit instead.

A lot of people have been wondering why it is some people not only just believe, but also heavily endorsed claims that can easily be disproven. Like, it's one thing to believe something that's fake, but it's another to stick to that belief

after all the evidence has been clearly shown to you and you are like 100% wrong.

A new research study published in the Journal of social psychology tackles this thing.

If you want to look it up, it's called symbolic show of strength, a predictor of risk

perception and belief in misinformation.

They did this study during the pandemic.

It was for, I think they surveyed 5 during the pandemic. It was for,

I think they surveyed 5,535 people across eight countries to investigate beliefs in COVID-19

misinformation along with like other things.

But you know, stuff like 5G networks were causing COVID or like that all the crazy stuff.

I'm curious that it was going to say because I feel like we've talked about this like our own theories.

Oh, yeah, many, many times.

Yeah, this is like pretty much where we're at, which is interesting.

So the biggest indicator they discovered on whether someone believed or not was how they viewed the prevention efforts in terms of symbolic strength versus weakness.

So in other words, these people cared more about the appearance of giving in once their belief was questioned rather than the fact that their belief was a lie. They would rather live in the

lie and know they were living in a lie than say you're right or give into an authority figure.

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