It’s not for nothing that my First and Second Laws of the Media are: Never believe a headline and When an article claims, “Science says…” or “A new study shows…”, assume that it doesn’t until proven otherwise.
Newshub has just proved the wisdom of these rules, in spectacular fashion.
A Newshub headline claimed that, Coronavirus: Unintelligent men less likely to comply with COVID-19 regulations – research. The article led with a video of anti-lockdown protests in Sydney.
The message was clear — and it was fake news.
In fact, Newshub’s article was a prime example of why most mainstream media science reporting is such garbage. Reporters, who don’t even bother to read the studies they’re reporting on and seem clearly incapable of understanding them if they did, regurgitating misleading press releases and ginning up fake news clickbait headlines.
Fake news, remember, isn’t just 100% made-up lies. It also includes misleading headlines, manipulated content, and false connections – headlines and imagery which don’t support the content.
So let’s look at what Newshub reported.
Stupid men are more likely to flout lockdown regulations in the COVID-19 era, new research has found.
A study by the University of Sydney assessed people’s attitudes and behaviours towards pandemic regulations in Australia, the UK, the US, and Canada, and found about 10 percent of people were non-compliant with preventative measures against COVID-19.
An online survey of 1575 people during the pandemic’s first wave in 2020 revealed the traits of those more likely to ignore the restrictions.
Those individuals were mostly male, less agreeable (cooperative, considerate), less intellectual as a personality trait, and more extroverted.
Newshub
In fact, the headline could just as accurately have read, Women who believe the government and mainstream media are more likely to do as they’re told.
The first thing to note is that the study never applied a specific and rigorous intelligence assessment, such as IQ. Instead, it looked at its participants through the lens of the so-called “Big 5 personality traits”.
I’ll leave off on the rigorousness of the Big 5 taxonomy; suffice it to say that I tend to agree with Karl Popper that psychology is too often closer to a pseudoscience than actual science.
But the pertinent detail here is that none of the Big 5 explicitly address intelligence. The closest is Openness to Experience, which is characterised as a general appreciation for novelty, aestheticism, curiosity, emotion and so on. Openness may be connected to intelligence in some ways, but the evidence is moderate to weak.
But the Covid study explicitly calls the trait “Openness/Intellect”: a subtle shifting of goalposts which should set alarm bells ringing. It absolutely does not justify calling a group “unintelligent”. Not once in the study is the word “intellectual” ever used.
Newshub’s use of “unintelligent” in its headline is 100% fake news.
What’s just as important to note is when the study was conducted and how.
The study was, as even Newshub admits, in the early days of the pandemic. It also talks about “a flatter curve” – does anyone remember when governments talked about that, rather than “elimination”? So its relevance to the past year of, especially in Australia, increasingly stringent lockdowns to even the smallest outbreaks, is severely limited. Certainly, to claim that it is “especially” significant “during the current Sydney lockdown” is a reach too far.
Another significant fact is the breakdown of the sample group: just under half were university students or their friends, three-quarters were female. Such a skewed sample throws serious doubt on claims made about a group being “better educated, younger” and women.
What the study claims to show about women is as illuminating as what Newshub says it does about men.
The compliant group reported greater use of official government and health information sources than the non-compliant group, suggesting compliant people are better-informed about COVID-19[…]Compliant individuals perceived their government as being more truthful.
Given how often we know that “official government and health information” has been woefully wrong, to claim that believing the government makes one “better informed” says perhaps all we need to know about the agenda, here.
There’s also a glaring elephant in the room that’s all the more significant in the light of the current media hysteria over vaccine take-up rates.
Males were more likely to support pharmaceutical measures such as vaccination.
PubMed
So that’s pretty good news about men, surely? Study: Men more likely to support vaccines.
Why didn’t Newshub lead with that headline?
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