Conspiracy believers tend to overrate their cognitive abilities and think most others agree with them
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A series of eight studies has uncovered a consistent pattern among people who believe in conspiracy theories: they tend to be overconfident in their cognitive abilities and significantly overestimate how much others agree with them. The findings, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, suggest that conspiracy belief may be fueled less by active motivations and more by a mistaken sense of certainty.
This research was conducted in response to a growing need to understand why people come to believe in conspiracy theories, especially those that are widely rejected by experts and the broader public. Prior work has emphasized motivations like the desire to feel unique, or to explain social and political events in a way that aligns with personal identity. But the researchers behind this new work proposed a different explanation. They hypothesized that people who consistently overestimate their own intellectual performance might be more likely to hold onto fringe beliefs and to falsely assume that others share their views.
“One of the thing that seems to distinguish (at least some) conspiracy theorists is not just that their beliefs seem to be based on poor evidence, but also that they appear so confident in their beliefs,” explained study author Gordon Pennycook, an associate professor at Cornell University
“The question we ask here is whether this tendency to be overconfident is more general than that. It’s obvious that people are overconfident in their beliefs; the question we ask here is whether people who tend to be overconfident in general (across domains) are more likely to believe conspiracies.”
The researchers carried out eight separate studies with a combined sample of 4,181 participants from the United States. Across the studies, participants completed various cognitive tasks designed to measure things like numerical reasoning, risk understanding, and perceptual accuracy. Crucially, after each task, participants were asked to estimate how well they thought they had performed.
This approach allowed the researchers to compare people’s actual test scores to their self-assessments, creating a measure of overconfidence. A person who scored poorly but believed they did well would be considered overconfident. The researchers then compared these overconfidence scores to how strongly participants endorsed conspiracy theories, including well-known but widely debunked claims like the moon landing being faked or vaccines being part of a government control plot.
The results showed a strong and consistent relationship between overconfidence and belief in false conspiracy theories. People who thought they had done well on tasks, even when they had not, were more likely to endorse conspiracies. Importantly, this relationship held even after accounting for other known predictors of conspiracy belief, such as low analytical thinking ability, narcissistic personality traits, and a desire to feel unique.
Content retrieved from: https://www.psypost.org/conspiracy-believers-tend-to-overrate-their-cognitive-abilities-and-think-most-others-agree-with-them/.
