conspiracy theories
Definition
Conspiracy theories refers to arguments put forward by individuals or groups suggesting that powerful agents act covertly in pursuit of often malicious goals, functioning as a means for people to make sense of uncertainty. They are not inherently false, and a meaningful distinction exists between believing a conspiracy may be occurring and endorsing a theory that is very unlikely to be true due to absent evidence or implausibly complex explanations. Belief in such theories is associated with negative personal and societal outcomes, including anti-social behaviour, dangerous health practices, and political extremism, which has driven researchers to design and test interventions aimed at reducing susceptibility. Four intervention types, including priming, passive inoculation, active inoculation, and discernment training, have been compared directly, with inoculation-based approaches reducing susceptibility to implausible conspiracy theories but failing to improve critical appraisal of plausible ones. A separate line of research finds that believers of implausible conspiratorial claims consistently rely on fewer normative justifications when evaluating evidence, pointing to an alternative epistemic framework rather than simple cognitive laziness as an explanatory mechanism.
Sources: O’Mahony et al. (2024), Robson et al. (2024)
Related Terms
- misinformation (3 shared articles)
- reasoning (1 shared article)
- content analysis (1 shared article)
- epistemically suspect beliefs (1 shared article)
- intervention (1 shared article)
- inoculation (1 shared article)
- discernment (1 shared article)
- critical appraisal (1 shared article)
- disinformation (1 shared article)
- interventions (1 shared article)
- fake news (1 shared article)
- resilience (1 shared article)
Applications
Conspiracy Theories and Inoculation Interventions
Inoculation interventions, which warn recipients about persuasive techniques and preemptively refute misleading arguments, have been tested as a means of reducing conspiracy belief across multiple studies. Passive and active inoculation conditions both produced significant reductions in epistemically unwarranted beliefs, with effect sizes of d = 0.25 and d = 0.27 respectively, but neither improved critical appraisal of plausible conspiracy theories, a limitation the authors termed blind scepticism. This pattern indicates that inoculation can confer resistance to clearly implausible content without necessarily building the discernment capacity needed to evaluate more credible conspiratorial claims.
Sources: O’Mahony et al. (2024)
Conspiracy Theories and Information Processing
Research comparing believers and nonbelievers of implausible claims finds that the two groups differ not in cognitive effort but in the type of justifications they generate when evaluating evidence. Fringe believers consistently provided fewer present-relevant justifications based on normative criteria such as an expert's field or consistency, and were more likely to substitute self-generated assumptions, across both studies in the programme. This pattern supports the view that adopting conspiratorial beliefs reflects an alternative epistemic framework that devalues conventional evidence quality rather than a failure to think carefully.
Sources: Robson et al. (2024)
Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation Resilience
Conspiracy beliefs are treated within the psychological resilience literature as a component of broader misinformation susceptibility, and better-targeted intervention designs are being applied to both phenomena simultaneously. Content analyses of believer reasoning are positioned as informing evidence-based strategies to reduce susceptibility at both individual and societal levels.
Sources: Kunst (2024)
