How to help friends and family dig out of a conspiracy theory black hole
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Someone I know became a conspiracy theorist seemingly overnight.
It was during the pandemic, and out of nowhere, they suddenly started posting daily on Facebook about the dangers of covid vaccines and masks, warning of an attempt to control us and keep us in our places. The government had planned it all; it was part of a wider plot by a group of shadowy pedophile elites who ran the world. The World Economic Forum was involved in some way, and Bill Gates, natch. The claims seemed to get wilder by the day. I didn’t always follow.
As a science and technology journalist, I felt that my duty was to respond. So I did, occasionally posting long debunking responses to their posts. I thought facts alone (uncertain as they were at the time) would help me win the argument. But all I got was derision. I was so naive, apparently. I eventually blocked this person for the sake of my own mental health.
Over the years since, I’ve often wondered: Could I have helped more? Are there things I could have done differently to talk them back down and help them see sense?
I should have spoken to Sander van der Linden, professor of social psychology in society at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Foolproof, a book about misinformation and how we make ourselves less susceptible to it.
As part of MIT Technology Review’s package on conspiracies, I gave him a call to ask: What would he advise if one of our family members or friends showed signs of having fallen down the rabbit hole?
Step 1:
Start with “pre-bunking”
The best way to avoid the conspiracy theory vortex is, of course, not to set foot in there in the first place. That’s the idea behind “pre-bunking,” an approach to dealing with conspiracies that works a lot like vaccination (the irony) against disease. By getting “inoculated” with knowledge about how conspiracy theories work, we become better prepared to spot the real thing when we come across it.
The concept stems from work in the 1960s by the social psychologist William McGuire, who was looking for ways to protect US soldiers from being indoctrinated by enemies. He came up with the idea of a “vaccine for brainwash.”
“Conspiracy theorists tend to negatively react to debunking and fact-checking … they become more aggressive and sort of double down in their beliefs,” says van der Linden. “But with the pre-bunking approach, they seem to be open to entertaining it.”
One of the most effective means of pre-bunking is to refrain from arguing about the facts of the matter and, instead, simply show people how they might be manipulated. This works best as part of a wider media literacy campaign, if you can reach people before they’re exposed to misinformation and conspiracy theories, but he says pre-bunking can also work as a therapy for people who are already partly radicalized. (As with an infection, it’s always better to avoid catching it in the first place than to treat the symptoms later, the thinking goes.)
The idea is to help people understand what rhetorical techniques have been used on them. It gives them the chance to think about how they might have been tricked. Maybe they fell for emotional storytelling (using emotional cues to reduce someone’s inclination to critically assess the core claims) or false dichotomies (making it appear there are only two sides to a topic, and you have to choose one). “One of the things we found is that conspiracy theorists hate manipulation, and they hate the idea of being manipulated,” van der Linden says.
“I kind of zoom out and deconstruct the manipulation techniques [and ask], Who’s benefiting from this? Who’s making money off of it? What are their incentives? And can you be duped by this?”
Read more https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/10/30/1126839/how-to-help-friends-and-family-dig-out-of-a-conspiracy-theory-black-hole/
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