Intuition, reason, and conspiracy beliefs

Binnendyk, Jabin; Pennycook, Gordon

doi:10.1016/j.copsyc.2022.101387

Cited by 35 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 56 publications

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“…Table 2 outlines the key findings. In all four studies, belief in conspiracy theories was always significantly negatively correlated with performance on the Cognitive Reflection Test and numeracy (r's range from -.19 to -.55)consistent with prior work indicating an association between intuitive processing and belief in conspiracies (Binnendyk & Pennycook, 2022).…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 85%

“…The causes and consequences of beliefs in conspiracy theories have drawn considerable attention among psychologists in recent years (Binnendyk & Pennycook, 2022;Douglas et al, 2017;Hornsey et al, 2022;Sunstein & Vermeule, 2009) and for good reason. Conspiracies about the COVID-19 pandemic have become mainstream (Alper et al, 2021;Kantorowicz-Reznichenko et al, 2022;Lazarević et al, 2021), as have conspiracies about other major events, such as the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election (Pennycook & Rand, 2021).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…That is, conspiracy believers are overly influenced by misinformation and hold such beliefs because they have difficulty distinguishing fiction from reality. By this account, therefore, people who believe false conspiracies lack analytic thinking skills (Binnendyk & Pennycook, 2022;Brotherton & French, 2014;Hattersley et al, 2022;Swami et al, 2014). For instance, people may come to conspiracies through intuitive biases (Binnendyk & Pennycook, 2022;Swami et al, 2014), such as hypersensitive agency detection (Douglas et al, 2016) or illusory pattern perception (van Prooijen et al, 2018).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Overconfidently conspiratorial: Conspiracy believers are dispositionally overconfident and massively overestimate how much others agree with them

Pennycook¹,

Binnendyk²,

Rand

2022

Preprint

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There is a pressing need to understand belief in false conspiracies. Past work has focused on the needs and motivations of conspiracy believers, as well as the role of overreliance on intuition. Here, we propose an alternative driver of belief in conspiracies: overconfidence. Across eight studies with 4,181 U.S. adults, conspiracy believers not only relied more intuition, but also overestimated their performance on numeracy and perception tests (i.e. were overconfident in their own abilities). This relationship with overconfidence was robust to controlling for analytic thinking, need for uniqueness, and narcissism, and was strongest for the most fringe conspiracies. We also found that conspiracy believers – particularly overconfident ones – massively overestimated (>4x) how much others agree with them: Although conspiracy beliefs were in the majority in only 12% of 150 conspiracies across three studies, conspiracy believers thought themselves to be in the majority 93% of the time.

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 85%

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confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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Overconfidently conspiratorial: Conspiracy believers are dispositionally overconfident and massively overestimate how much others agree with them

Pennycook¹,

Binnendyk²,

Rand

2022

Preprint

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“…Using a different AOT scale, we found correlations ranging from −.19 to −.29 in Prolific samples ( Stanovich and Toplak 2019 ). These findings have been much replicated, as AOT scales have been found to correlate with a variety of different measures of conspiracy belief ( Binnendyk and Pennycook 2022 ; Erceg et al 2022 ; Jastrzębski and Chuderski 2022 ; Pennycook et al 2020 ; Rizeq et al 2021 ; Yelbuz et al 2022 ).…”

Section: Twenty-five Years Trying To Measure Aotmentioning

confidence: 75%

Actively Open-Minded Thinking and Its Measurement

Stanovich

Toplak

2023

J. Intell.

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Actively open-minded thinking (AOT) is measured by items that tap the willingness to consider alternative opinions, sensitivity to evidence contradictory to current beliefs, the willingness to postpone closure, and reflective thought. AOT scales are strong predictors of performance on heuristics and biases tasks and of the avoidance of reasoning traps such as superstitious thinking and belief in conspiracy theories. Nevertheless, AOT is most commonly measured with questionnaires rather than performance indicators. Questionnaire contamination becomes even more of a danger as the AOT concept is expanded into new areas such as the study of fake news, misinformation, ideology, and civic attitudes. We review our 25-year history of studying the AOT concept and developing our own AOT scale. We present a 13-item scale that both is brief and accommodates many previous criticisms and refinements. We include a discussion of why AOT scales are such good predictors of performance on heuristics and biases tasks. We conclude that it is because such scales tap important processes of cognitive decoupling and decontextualization that modernity increasingly requires. We conclude by discussing the paradox that although AOT scales are potent predictors of performance on most rational thinking tasks, they do not predict the avoidance of myside thinking, even though it is virtually the quintessence of the AOT concept.

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“…Furthermore, increasing deliberation only had a decreasing effect on the evaluation of conspiratorial content for those who were either high or low in conspiracy mentality, indicating that people who are indifferent to conspiracies may not show a robust effect (Bago et al, 2022). Nonetheless, priming rationality (by simply asking people if they feel rational) has been shown to increase the negative relationship between cognitive ability and conspiracy mentality (Adam-Troian et al, 2019), suggesting a potential causal relationship between the motivation to engage in deliberation and the use of cognitive resources to question conspiracies (for a recent review, see Binnendyk & Pennycook, 2022).…”

Section: Conspiracy Beliefsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intuition, reason, and conspiracy beliefs

Cited by 35 publications

References 56 publications

Overconfidently conspiratorial: Conspiracy believers are dispositionally overconfident and massively overestimate how much others agree with them

Overconfidently conspiratorial: Conspiracy believers are dispositionally overconfident and massively overestimate how much others agree with them

Actively Open-Minded Thinking and Its Measurement

A framework for understanding reasoning errors: From fake news to climate change and beyond

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