“Fringe” beliefs aren’t fringe

Abstract

COVID-19 and the 2021 U.S. Capitol attacks have highlighted the potential dangers of pseudoscientific and conspiratorial belief adoption. Approaches to combating misinformed beliefs have tried to “pre-bunk” or “inoculate” people against misinformation adoption and have yielded only modest results. These approaches presume that some citizens may be more gullible than others and thus susceptible to multiple misinformed beliefs. We provide evidence of an alternative account it’s simply too hard for all people to be accurate in all domains of belief, but most individuals are trying. We collected data on a constellation of human beliefs across domains from more than 1,700 people on Amazon Mechanical Turk. We find misinformed beliefs to be broadly, but thinly, spread among the population. Further, we do not find that individuals who adopt one misinformed belief are more likely to engage in pseudo-scientific or conspiratorial thinking across the board, in opposition to “slippery slope” notions of misinformation adoption.

Social Prevalence Is Rationally Integrated in Belief Updating

“…Participants read a series of statements relating to real-world conspiratorial, pseudoscientific, or misinformed beliefs (e.g., "The earth is flat," "Wearing masks is harmful to the health of the mask wearer," "The U.S. government planned the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center"; see the Supplemental Materials for the full list). We chose beliefs that are recently attested but thinly and weakly held (Martí et al, 2021). These low-probability beliefs serve as a stringent test of the strength of social influence.…”

“…We debriefed participants at the end of the experiment. We provided a representative prevalence estimate of all of the beliefs based on a large sample of over 900 Americans (Martí et al, 2021) and reminded participants that prevalent beliefs are not necessarily true.…”