Conspiracy theorists don’t realize they’re on the fringe

Summary

Ars Technica: Overestimating how many people agree with them seems to be at odds with conspiracy theorists' desire to be unique. Gordon Pennycook: In general, people who believe conspiracies often have contrary beliefs. We're working with a population where coherence is not to be expected. They say that they're in the majority, but it's never a strong majority. They just don't think that they're in a minority when it comes to the belief. Take the case of the Sandy Hook conspiracy, where adherents believe it was a false flag operation. In one sample, 8 percent of people thought that this was true. That 8 percent thought 61 percent of people agreed with them. So they're way off. They really, really miscalibrated. But they don't say 90 percent. It's 60 percent, enough to be special, but not enough to be on the fringe where they actually are. I could have asked them to rank how smart they are relative to others, or how unique they thought their beliefs were, and they would've answered high on that. But those are kind of mushy self-concepts. When you ask a specific question that has an objectively correct answer in terms of the percent of people in the sample that agree with you, it's not close. Ars Technica: How does one even begin to combat this? Could last year's AI study point the way? Gordon Pennycook: The AI debunking effect works better for people who are less overconfident. In those experiments, very detailed, specific debunks had a much bigger effect than people expected. After eight minutes of conversation, a quarter of the people who believed the thing didn't believe it anymore, but 75 percent still did. That's a lot. And some of them, not only did they still believe it, they still believed it to the same degree. So no one's cracked that. Getting any movement at all in the aggregate was a big win. Here's the problem. You can't have a conversation with somebody who doesn't want to have the conversation. In those studies, we're paying people, but they still get ...