From the “Little Aussie Bleeder” to Newstopia : (really) fake news in Australia

This paper offers an overview of the key characteristics of “fake” news in the Australian national context. Focusing on two television shows – The Norman Gunston Show and NEWStopia – it historicizes “fake” news within Australian television culture, situating it as part of a broader tradition of what Turner (1989) calls “Transgressive TV.” After analyzing the core comedic themes, styles, and intertextual relationships of both shows, the paper concludes that, although news parody in Australia has tended to be highly fictionalized, it may nevertheless play a vital role in helping viewers better understand generic devices that frame and govern “real” television news.

How many fake Sandy pictures were really shared on social media?

Many dramatic images of hurricane Sandy hitting the east coast of the US have been captured but which have been tweeted the most and which are real?

Nasdijj's fake magical realist memoir: re-visioning magical realism's relationship with fakery

Examining what might be described as Nasdijj’s "fake magical realist memoir" The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams, this paper is interested in how Nasdijj's text might be useful in contesting our understanding of the postcolonial literature of magical realism. Drawing attention to Nasdijj’s utilization of the “primitivist” conventions of magical realism, this paper will illustrate how fakery might be seen as essential not only to Nasdijj's text but also to magical realism. In fact, this paper argues that magical realist novels might be productively read as hoaxes, mobilizing what Graham Huggan describes as the "postcolonial exotic" in order to engage in a subversive act of “culture jamming”. The objective of the analysis is not to condemn magical realism along with Nasdijj’s opportunistic memoir, but rather to rescue magical realism from ideas about authenticity, celebrating its ironies and its challenges to colonial discourses of identity and history.

Individual differences in intention to fake job interviews: Personality, self-monitoring, and the theory of planned behaviour

When job applicants lie in job interviews, they can deprive a more honest candidate of a job and deprive an organisation of the best employees. To better understand job interview faking, the present study examined the effect of general dispositions and domain-specific beliefs on the intention to fake job interviews. A community sample of 313 participants completed measures of personality (i.e., extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness) and self-monitoring, and a domain-specific measure of beliefs about faking job interviews based on the theory of planned behaviour, which measured attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioural control. Results indicated that the measure of attitudes was the strongest predictor of intention to fake. In line with the compatibility principle, the domain-specific measures based on the theory of planned behaviour correlated much more strongly with intentions to fake job interviews than did the general measures of personality or self-monitoring. Of the dispositional measures, lower conscientiousness, higher neuroticism, and higher self-monitoring was associated with greater intention to fake job interviews. The findings support a model whereby the effect of personality on intentions is partially mediated by domain-specific beliefs.

The Location of Cultural Authenticity: Identifying the Real and the Fake in Urban Guizhou

This article examines notions of cultural identity and authenticity and how these notions are articulated in the small city of Kaili in Guizhou Province, an ethnically diverse region. Despite its urban status, Kaili has been branded by the local government as a yuanshengtai tourist destination. This Chinese term literally translates as “original ecology” but is used in ordinary conversation to denote a cultural authenticity in which people exist in quiet harmony with nature. Promotional literature uses the term to tout the ethnic cultural practices that mainly occur in the villages of Kaili’s municipal periphery. In contrast, many local urban inhabitants—although amenable to the promotion of Kaili as a tourist destination—have rejected the notion that the city itself could be considered culturally authentic, and proudly declare themselves “fake” ethnic minorities, as against the “genuine” ethnic people of surrounding villages. These small-city inhabitants have also defined themselves against big-city visitors by attributing to the visitors a naïve fascination with cultural authenticity, while themselves remaining aloof from such practices. The cultural authenticity discourse in Kaili has thus facilitated a reordering of social and spatial hierarchies, as blasé small-city residents define themselves against both culturally authentic rural people and authenticity-seeking big-city tourists. In analyzing this, the article draws out the broader implications regarding PRC notions of ethnicity, cultural practices, heritage, and identity.

Cyber Enigmas? Passive Detection and Pedagogical Agents: Can Students Spot the fake?

This paper presents a study that was undertaken to examine human interaction with a pedagogical agent and the passive and active detection of such agents within a synchronous, online environment. A pedagogical agent is a software application which can provide a human like interaction using a natural language interface. These may be familiar from the smartphone interfaces such as ‘Siri’ or ‘Cortana’, or the virtual online assistants found on some websites, such as ‘Anna’ on the Ikea website. Pedagogical agents are characters on the computer screen with embodied life-like behaviours such as speech, emotions, locomotion, gestures, and movements of the head, the eye, or other parts of the body. The passive detection test is where participants are not primed to the potential presence of a pedagogical agent within the online environment. The active detection test is where participants are primed to the potential presence of a pedagogical agent. The purpose of the study was to examine how people passively detected pedagogical agents that were presenting themselves as humans in an online environment. In order to locate the pedagogical agent in a realistic higher education online environment, problem-based learning online was used. Problem-based learning online provides a focus for discussions and participation, without creating too much artificiality. The findings indicated that the ways in which students positioned the agent tended to influence the interaction between them. One of the key findings was that since the agent was focussed mainly on the pedagogical task this may have hampered interaction with the students, however some of its non-task dialogue did improve students' perceptions of the autonomous agents’ ability to interact with them. It is suggested that future studies explore the differences between the relationships and interactions of learner and pedagogical agent within authentic situations, in order to understand if students' interactions are different between real and virtual mentors in an online setting.

The role of fluid and emotional intelligence in malingering

The purpose of the present study was to examine the role of fluid (gf), social (SI) and emotional intelligence (EI) in faking the Beck Depression Inventory (2nd ed., BDI-II). Twenty-two students and 26 non-students completed Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices (APM), a social insight test, the Schutte et al. self-report EI scale, and the BDI-II under honest and faking instructions. Results were consistent with a new model of successful faking, in which a participant’s original response must be manipulated into a strategic response, which must match diagnostic criteria. As hypothesised, the BDI-II could be faked, and gf was not related to faking ability. Counter to expectations, however, SI and EI were not related to faking ability. A second study explored why EI failed to facilitate faking. Forty-nine students and 50 non-students completed the EI measure, the Marlowe-Crown Scale and the Levenson et al. Psychopathy Scale. As hypothesised, EI was negatively correlated with psychopathy, but EI showed no relationship with socially desirable responding. It was concluded that in the first experiment, high-EI people did fake effectively, but high-psychopathy people (who had low EI) were also faking effectively, resulting in a distribution that showed no advantage to high EI individuals.

Towards a new model of successful faking

Existing literature has failed to find robust relationships between individual differences and the ability to fake psychological tests, possibly due to limitations in how successful faking is operationalised. In order to fake, individuals must alter their original profile to create a particular impression. Currently, successful faking is operationalised through statistical definitions, informant ratings, known groups comparisons, the use of archival and baseline data, and breaches of validity indexes. However, there are many methodological limitations to these approaches. This research proposed a three component model of successful faking to address this, where an original response is manipulated into a strategic response, which must match a criteria target. Further, by operationalising successful faking in this manner, this research takes into account the fact that individuals may have been successful in reaching their implicitly created profile, but that this may not have matched the criteria they were instructed to fake.Participants (N=48, 22 students and 26 non-students) completed the BDI-II honestly. Participants then faked the BDI-II as if they had no, mild, moderate and severe depression, as well as completing a checklist revealing which symptoms they thought indicated each level of depression. Findings were consistent with a three component model of successful faking, where individuals effectively changed their profile to what they believed was required, however this profile differed from the criteria defined by the psychometric norms of the test.One of the foremost issues for research in this area is the inconsistent manner in which successful faking is operationalised. This research allowed successful faking to be operationalised in an objective, quantifiable manner. Using this model as a template may allow researchers better understanding of the processes involved in faking, including the role of strategies and abilities in determining the outcome of test dissimulation.

Do warnings deter rather than produce more sophisticated malingering?

Following Youngjohn, Lees-Haley, and Binder's (1999) comment on Johnson and Lesniak-Karpiak's (1997) study that warnings lead to more subtle malingering, researchers have sought to better understand warning effects. However, such studies have been largely atheoretical and may have confounded warning and coaching. This study examined the effect on malingering of a warning that was based on criminological-sociological concepts derived from the rational choice model of deterrence theory. A total of 78 participants were randomly assigned to a control group, an unwarned simulator group, or one of two warned simulator groups. The warning groups comprised low- and high-level conditions depending on warning intensity. Simulator participants received no coaching about how to fake tests. Outcome variables were scores derived from the Test of Memory Malingering and Wechsler Memory Scale-III. When the rate of malingering was compared across the four groups, a high-level warning effect was found such that warned participants were significantly less likely to exaggerate than unwarned simulators. In an exploratory follow-up analysis, the warned groups were divided into those who reported malingering and those who did not report malingering, and the performance of these groups was compared to that of unwarned simulators and controls. Using this approach, results showed that participants who were deterred from malingering by warning performed no worse than controls. However, on a small number of tests, self-reported malingerers in the low-level warning group appeared less impaired than unwarned simulators. This pattern was not observed in the high-level warning condition. Although cautious interpretation of findings is necessitated by the exploratory nature of some analyses, overall results suggest that using a carefully designed warning may be useful for reducing the rate of malingering. The combination of some noteworthy effect sizes, despite low power and the small size of some groups, suggests that further investigation of the effects of warnings needs to continue to determine their effect more fully.