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

Abstract

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.

The Role of Cognitive Biases in Shaping Irrational Beliefs: A Multi-Study Investigation

“…Overconfidence bias was related to a higher endorsement of irrational beliefs, especially magical health beliefs and medical conspiracy theories. Contrary to the previous studies, it was not a reliable predictor of superstitiousness and general conspiracist beliefs (Pennycook et al, 2022;Teovanović et al, 2021). Similarly, the finding that belief bias was not substantially related to superstitiousness stands in contrast to previous research (Erceg et al, 2022;Kokis et al, 2002;Šrol, 2022;Toplak et al, 2017), while its most consistent influence was observed in predicting both conspiracist beliefs and magical health beliefs.…”

“…Teleological bias, an inclination to perceive things as having a specific purpose or goal rather than recognizing them as outcomes of natural processes or random events (Kelemen & Rosset, 2009), was previously related to both conspiracist (Wagner-Egger et al, 2018) and paranormal beliefs (Lindeman et al, 2023), while overconfidence bias, as a belief in own abilities that exceeds the objective evidence supporting such confidence (Fischhoff et al, 1977), was shown to relate to conspiracist beliefs (Pennycook et al, 2022) and antiscientific attitudes (Trémolière & Djeriouat, 2021).…”

People Who Believe Implausible Claims are not Cognitive Misers: Evidence from Evaluation Tasks

“…For one, believers may be lazy in their evaluations, but instead rely on an alternative epistemology that deviates from conventional forms of evidence (Harambam & Aupers, 2021;Lewandowsky et al, 2017). Overconfidence may also be implicated, with belief in conspiracies (Pennycook et al, 2022) and fake news (Lyons et al, 2021) positively correlating with overconfidence. Indeed, the believers in Study 3 perceived their analytical ability to be higher than non-believers did.…”

Insight in the Conspiracist’s Mind

“…For example, questionnaire-based research suggests overconfidence, in the form of the illusion of explanatory depth, is prevalent among conspiracists (Vitriol & Marsh, 2018). Very recently, Pennycook et al (2022) found that conspiracy believers are also overconfident in the sense of overestimating their performance on difficult numeracy and perception tasks. But this has not been tested with experimental, well-controlled metacognition tasks that could reveal whether conspiracists monitor their uncertainty less effectively (e.g., higher confidence bias or lower confidence sensitivity; Desender et al, 2018;Rollwage et al, 2018).…”

“…But this has not been tested with experimental, well-controlled metacognition tasks that could reveal whether conspiracists monitor their uncertainty less effectively (e.g., higher confidence bias or lower confidence sensitivity; Desender et al, 2018;Rollwage et al, 2018). Different from Pennycook et al (2022), this would require a trial-by-trial design with controlled levels of uncertainty to measure how well actual trial uncertainty matched with perceived confidence.…”