Scientific article
OA Policy
English

Conspiracy believers claim to be free thinkers but (Under)Use advice like everyone else

Published inBritish journal of social psychology, bjso.12655
Publication date2023-05-26
First online date2023-05-26
Abstract

Conspiracy believers often claim to be critical thinkers doing their “own research” instead of relying on others’ testimony. In two preregistered behavioral studies conducted in the UK and Pakistan (Nparticipants = 864, Ntrials = 5408) we test if conspiracy believers have a general tendency to discount social information (in favor of their own opinions and intuitions). We found that conspiracy mentality is not associated with social information use in text-based (Study 1) and image-based (Study 2) advice-taking tasks. Yet, we found discrepancies between self-reported and actual social information use. Conspiracy believers were more likely to report relying less on social information than actually relying less on social information in the behavioral tasks. Our results suggest that the skepticism of conspiracy believers towards epistemic authorities is unlikely to be the manifestation of a general tendency to discount social information. Conspiracy believers may be more permeable to social influence than they sometimes claim.

Keywords
  • Conspiracy mentality
  • Advice taking
  • Social information
  • Egocentric discounting
  • Epistemic individualism
  • Conformity
Citation (ISO format)
ALTAY, Sacha et al. Conspiracy believers claim to be free thinkers but (Under)Use advice like everyone else. In: British journal of social psychology, 2023, p. bjso.12655. doi: 10.1111/bjso.12655
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Article (Accepted version)
accessLevelPublic
Identifiers
Journal ISSN0144-6665
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541downloads

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