New research indicates that teaching people about scientific reasoning can reduce their susceptibility to conspiratorial beliefs. The new findings have been published in Applied Cognitive Psychology.
“Our research team has been looking at why people believe conspiracy theories for a number of years,” said study author Neophytos Georgiou, a PhD candidate at the University of Adelaide.
“The interest comes from how conspiracy theories can be quite pervasive, often inspiring rather intricate beliefs about how the world works. This area of research has particularly become topical in the past few years due to the events of the COVID-19 pandemic, with an emphasis now drawn to how people digest online information. Conspiracy theories have become a focussed consequence during this time period.”
A sample of 700 participants from various countries was drawn from Prolific, with a majority from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and South Africa. The participants completed demographic questions and psychometric assessments, then listened to a 11-minute audio recording presenting a complex conspiracy theory regarding the origin and purpose of the pandemic.
Afterward, they answered questions about their endorsement of the conspiracy theory and its credibility. Participants were then randomly assigned to either a scientific reasoning condition or a control condition.
In the scientific reasoning condition, participants listened to a clip that challenged the claims made in the first recording and provided objections to the logical inconsistencies of the conspiracy theories. “The aim of this condition was to provide a form of psychoeducation regarding the importance of scientific reasoning,” the researchers explained.
The control condition involved a neutral recording detailing the current statistics of COVID-19 cases across the world.
The participants then completed a post-intervention conspiracy assessment task in which they were presented with a series of seven excerpts. Three of the excerpts described scientifically correct information. The four other excerpts described conspiracy theories such as the role of “natural” health remedies in cancer treatment or the claim that fluoridated water has resulted in a decrease in children’s IQ scores.
The researchers found evidence that the scientific reasoning intervention reduced belief in conspiracy theories. Participants in the scientific reasoning condition were significantly less likely to view the four conspiracy theories as credible and true compared to those in the control condition.
“The take home message from this study is that there are certain skills related to appraising information online that are key in debunking conspiracy beliefs,” Georgiou told PsyPost. “In this study we’ve taken steps towards encouraging some of those skills related to scientific reasoning and found we could change how people dealt with conspiracy theory information. This study was an intervention design, meaning compared to a control group, those who were given a ‘scientific reasoning program‘ or referred to as a psychoeducational approach in this field, demonstrated lower conspiracy beliefs.”
“Whilst there has been very important research on combatting related content to conspiracy theories (e.g., Pennycook et al., 2021), there is limited work in the field of interventions for conspiracy theory beliefs,” Georgiou said. “This very much is an initial approach, with many improvements that could be made to the methodology in future attempts, very much work to be built upon in future research.”
“Some of the key questions would be, is this a method of reducing conspiracy beliefs long term? It can be argued this work so far simply shows that people are willing to alter their appraisal of this information under certain conditions.”
Importantly, the findings held after accounting for demographic factors such as gender, age, country of residence, highest education level, current employment status. The researchers also controlled for prior history of clinical diagnosis, the tendency to engage in analytical thinking, scientific reasoning skills, autistic personality traits, and schizotypy.
“This work will be rather important going forward considering how easily conspiracy theory beliefs can be propagated across social media platforms, and, whilst there is literature out there regarding how to help people adjust their approach to this content, nothing of yet is truly inoculating,” Georgiou said. “This could be a potential avenue going forward that could do so.”
The study, “The effectiveness of a scientific reasoning intervention for conspiracy theory beliefs“, was authored by Neophytos Georgiou, Paul Delfabbro, and Ryan Balzan.