The Associative Foundation of Conspiratorial Thought

Abstract

People sometimes fail to learn the correct structure of the world, which can lead to outlandish, even conspiratorial, beliefs. Little research, however, has considered how these beliefs are learnt. In associative learning, blocking occurs when people learn less about a novel cue in the presence of another causally predictive cue. Here, blocking was demonstrated in a conspiratorial context. In the task, participants were told of a foreign politician and of a possible conspiracy: this politician has allegedly been poisoned at a given location. Participants then learned about a set of location-illness pairings, with the conspiracy-congruent location paired with somewhere novel to establish if learning about this second location was blocked. Learning about this novel location was blocked by the conspiratorial description and, on aggregate, participants endorsed this conspiracy theory. There was, however, no evidence that conspiracy theorists were more likely to demonstrate blocking in general.