Does Developing a Belief in One Conspiracy Theory Lead a Person to be More Likely to Believe in Others?

Does Developing a Belief in One Conspiracy Theory Lead a Person to be More Likely to Believe in Others?

ABSTRACT The monological belief system model suggests that—for at least a subset of people—developing a belief in one conspiracy theory will cause them to be more likely to believe in others. This model has been influential in the literature, but its core causal hypothesis has never been credibly tested. We therefore tested it in two longitudinal studies. Study 1 used a sample from New Zealand and Australia ( N  = 498), with 7 monthly waves. Study 2 (preregistered) used a sample from New Zealand, Australia and the United Kingdom ( N  = 978), with 13 monthly waves. We applied random intercept cross‐lagged panel models, permitting a credible causal identification strategy, albeit we cannot rule out time‐varying confounds. We find that increased belief in a conspiracy theory at one wave did (on average) predict increased belief in other conspiracies at the next wave, although the estimated coefficients were small.

Leveraging Motivations to Curb Misinformation: Self-Affirmation Reduces the Appeal of Political Conspiracy Theories

Abstract: In an era where digital misinformation poses significant challenges to societal well-being, this study explores a novel approach to preserving information integrity by addressing the motivational underpinnings of conspiracy theory engagement. As conspiracy theories proliferate online, traditional fact-checking and debunking strategies often prove ineffective due to the self-reinforcing nature of conspiracy theories. This research investigates whether a priori self-affirmation interventions can reduce individuals’ propensity to engage with conspiracy theories by preemptively fulfilling the ego-protective function these theories often serve. Using a randomized experiment ( N = 451), this study finds that participants who completed a self-affirmation task were less likely to read politicized conspiracy theories, and those who chose to read a conspiracy theory reported greater feelings of affirmation than those who did not. Thus, bolstering individuals’ self-integrity may offer an opportunity to mitigate the appeal of politicized conspiracy theories.

The spreading of misinformation online

Significance The wide availability of user-provided content in online social media facilitates the aggregation of people around common interests, worldviews, and narratives. However, the World Wide Web is a fruitful environment for the massive diffusion of unverified rumors. In this work, using a massive quantitative analysis of Facebook, we show that information related to distinct narratives––conspiracy theories and scientific news––generates homogeneous and polarized communities (i.e., echo chambers) having similar information consumption patterns. Then, we derive a data-driven percolation model of rumor spreading that demonstrates that homogeneity and polarization are the main determinants for predicting cascades’ size. , The wide availability of user-provided content in online social media facilitates the aggregation of people around common interests, worldviews, and narratives. However, the World Wide Web (WWW) also allows for the rapid dissemination of unsubstantiated rumors and conspiracy theories that often elicit rapid, large, but naive social responses such as the recent case of Jade Helm 15––where a simple military exercise turned out to be perceived as the beginning of a new civil war in the United States. In this work, we address the determinants governing misinformation spreading through a thorough quantitative analysis. In particular, we focus on how Facebook users consume information related to two distinct narratives: scientific and conspiracy news. We find that, although consumers of scientific and conspiracy stories present similar consumption patterns with respect to content, cascade dynamics differ. Selective exposure to content is the primary driver of content diffusion and generates the formation of homogeneous clusters, i.e., “echo chambers.” Indeed, homogeneity appears to be the primary driver for the diffusion of contents and each echo chamber has its own cascade dynamics. Finally, we introduce a data-driven percolation model mimicking rumor spreading and we show that homogeneity and polarization are the main determinants for predicting cascades’ size.

CFP: Religion, Politics, and Cognitive Warfare: Information, Interpretation, Conspiracy, and the Struggle for Reality

The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory (JCRT) invites proposals for an online conference entitled Religion, Politics, and Cognitive Warfare: Information, Interpretation, Conspiracy, and the Struggle for Reality. The proceedings will be considered for publication in a special issue of the JCRT. This conference investigates how beliefs, paranoia, and conspiratorial modes of knowing shape a contemporary cognitive battlespace in which actors struggle to define truth, authority, and reality itself. Drawing on Michel Foucault's Lectures on the Will to Know and Julia Kristeva's This Incredible Need to Believe (2024), we focus on practices of selective fact use and "truth-selecting" that construct alternative epistemic orders while claiming privileged access to what is "really" going on. Rather than treating conspiracy thinking as merely political or psychological, the conference foregrounds its religious dimensions: faith in hidden powers, moral dualism, apocalyptic expectation, and hermeneutical struggle over revelatory access to the real. Conspiracy cultures routinely reproduce theological structures of knowing—visions of salvation and corruption, truth and deception, initiation and blindness. At the same time, new forms of "cognitive warfare" reframe these religious energies within state and platform attempts to govern perception, attention, and trust. Artificial intelligence, algorithmic media, and strategic information campaigns do not only deliver messages; they create digital ecologies in which suspicion becomes faith-like and revelation is continual. The conference organizers are seeking proposals of high academic quality that take a reflective and analytical approach to both general and specific topics with international appeal or focus. We encourage contributions from scholars of religious studies, philosophy, communication, sociology, security studies, psychology, media, and related fields. Submissions should engage religion as a dynamic force—conceptually, historically, or materially—within the cognitive battlespaces of our time. We encourage contributions from a spectrum of perspectives, approaches, and methodologies. We are not interested in papers that simply rehearse or promote particular conspiracies, or that use the conference as a platform for calling out disliked groups. We are not interested in polemics, jeremiad, or de facto advocacy pieces. Instead, we welcome theoretically informed and methodologically rigorous work that takes the religious and epistemic dimensions of cognitive conflict seriously as objects of critical inquiry.

The Conspiracy Theory About Wayfair Is Spreading Quickly Among Lifestyle Influencers On Instagram

The theory plays into the bigger QAnon conspiracy theory, which baselessly claims that the world is controlled by a secret cabal of pedophiles that President Trump is actively fighting against.

How 9/11 Made Everyone a Conspiracy Theorist

Crackpot theories were once the stuff of shortwave radio, but September 11 unleashed the Age of Alex Jones.

How conspiracy theories conquered America

Things have changed a lot since January 6th, 2021.

Fauci’s COVID-origins hearing shows how conspiracy theories became political weapons

Conspiracy theories don’t just explain events – they identify villains, and Fauci is among the most popular.

A Rational Analysis of the Effects of Sycophantic AI

People increasingly use large language models (LLMs) to explore ideas, gather information, and make sense of the world. In these interactions, they encounter agents that are overly agreeable. We argue that this sycophancy poses a unique epistemic risk to how individuals come to see the world: unlike hallucinations that introduce falsehoods, sycophancy distorts reality by returning responses that are biased to reinforce existing beliefs. We provide a rational analysis of this phenomenon, showing that when a Bayesian agent is provided with data that are sampled based on a current hypothesis the agent becomes increasingly confident about that hypothesis but does not make any progress towards the truth. We test this prediction using a modified Wason 2-4-6 rule discovery task where participants (N=557) interacted with AI agents providing different types of feedback. Unmodified LLM behavior suppressed discovery and inflated confidence comparably to explicitly sycophantic prompting. By contrast, unbiased sampling from the true distribution yielded discovery rates five times higher. These results reveal how sycophantic AI distorts belief, manufacturing certainty where there should be doubt.

LLM Audit 22 July Conspiracy Theories

Factiverse and Revontulet tested 9 leading AI models with 5,616 requests to see how they handle conspiracy narratives about the 22 July attacks. Read the findings.

Supernatural explanations across 114 societies are more common for natural than social phenomena

Humans across the globe use supernatural beliefs to explain the world around them. This article explores whether cultural groups invoke the supernatural more to explain natural phenomena (for example, storms, disease outbreaks) or social phenomena (for example, murder, warfare). Quantitative analysis of ethnographic text across 114 geographically and culturally diverse societies found that supernatural explanations are more prevalent for natural than for social phenomena, consistent with theories that ground the origin of religious belief in a human tendency to perceive intent and agency in the natural world. Despite the dominance of supernatural explanations of natural phenomena, supernatural explanations of social phenomena were especially prevalent in urbanized societies with more socially complex and anonymous groups. Our results show how people use supernatural beliefs as explanatory tools in non-industrial societies, and how these applications vary across small-scale communities versus large and urbanized groups.

Predictive processing frameworks for perception can explain recent drone sightings in the United States

We draw on the predictive processing theory of perception to explain why healthy, intelligent, honest, and psychologically normal people might easily misperceive lights in the sky as threatening or extraordinary objects, especially in the context of WEIRD (western, educated, industrial, rich, and democratic) societies. We argue that the uniquely sparse properties of skyborne and celestial stimuli make it difficult for an observer to update prior beliefs, which can be easily fit to observed lights. Moreover, we hypothesize that humans have likely evolved to perceive the sky and its perceived contents as deeply meaningful. Finally, we briefly discuss the possible role of generalized distrust in scientific institutions and ultimately argue for the importance of astronomy education for producing a society with prior beliefs that support veridical perception.

Short Dialogues with AI Reduce Belief in Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories

A groundbreaking study supported by ADL found that fact-based dialogues with a trained AI chatbot durably reduced antisemitic conspiracy beliefs and increased favorability toward Jews.

Following news on social media boosts knowledge, belief accuracy and trust

Many worry that news on social media leaves people uninformed or even misinformed. Here we conducted a preregistered two-wave online field experiment in France and Germany (N = 3,395) to estimate the effect of following the news on Instagram and WhatsApp. Participants were asked to follow two accounts for 2 weeks and activate the notifications. In the treatment condition, the accounts were those of news organizations, while in the control condition they covered cooking, cinema or art. The treatment enhanced current affairs knowledge, participants’ ability to discern true from false news stories and awareness of true news stories, as well as trust in the news. The treatment had no significant effects on feelings of being informed, political efficacy, affective polarization and interest in news or politics. These results suggest that, while some forms of social media use are harmful, others are beneficial and can be leveraged to foster a well-informed society.

Large language memories: Psychosis and antisocial media

Using the fields of memory studies and digital humanities, this article argues that there has been a shift from more collective and social memory to more personalised and individual memory. This shift, it is argued here, can be conceptualised through the psychoanalytic concept of ‘psychosis’. While the causes of the changes in our patterns of memory have been located in capitalist and neoliberal principles, the effects of the changes in our memory habits might be found in psychosis. From falling in love with machinic AI replicas to indulging in conspiracy theories to acting as if we are social media influencers or backing ourselves to win out in impossible job markets, we are inclined towards personal fantasy, often at the expense of participating in social life. But why do we do this? Why is it easier to believe a farfetched conspiracy theory or wild personal dream than it is to participate socially and collectively in the world we live in? Part of the reason, at least, is found in our increasing habitual reliance on new and emergent technologies. Often presented to us as a brand-new form of Artificial Intelligence, these generative tools are the latest update to a longer pattern in our digital world: the trend of developing ‘relationships’ with algorithms that, to larger and smaller degrees, we come to rely on for habits of cognition and recognition. By affecting our patterns of memory, these technologies produce a kind of isolation that lends itself to individual and fantastical – rather than shared and realist – thinking.