UCC Researchers Investigate Methods of Countering Conspiracy Theories and Disinformation

By Paula Dennan, Deputy News Editor

New research conducted by UCC shows that critical thinking skills can be effective in countering conspiracy beliefs. The study, which the Irish Research Council funded in partnership with Google, also found that many well-established strategies for reducing people’s belief in conspiracies were ineffective. The study is the first to compare the effectiveness of conspiracy thinking interventions directly. 

The study describes conspiracy theories as ‘arguments put forward by individuals or groups, suggesting that powerful agents act covertly in the pursuit of often malicious goals.’ Conspiracy beliefs have become more mainstream in recent years, from disinformation about Covid-19 vaccines and stolen elections in the United States to the increasing number of anti-LGBTQIA+ library protests, with social media often intensifying their spread. 

Researchers note that conspiracy theories are not inherently untrue because conspiracies have been uncovered throughout history. They differentiate between believing a conspiracy is happening, which is not necessarily ‘inaccurate or harmful’, and believing in a conspiracy theory that is unlikely to be true based on ‘a lack of evidence, or due to the absurdly complex explanation put forward.’

Cian O’Mahony, the study lead researcher from the UCC School of Applied Psychology, said, ‘Events like Watergate and Tuskegee Syphilis Study show us that sometimes conspiracies can happen. It is important that we are not just teaching people to reject everything that is labelled as a conspiracy theory. Our study introduces a new approach that encourages careful judgment and cautions against automatic scepticism. Our new intervention, which reminds people not to reject an idea just because it’s labelled a conspiracy and discourages blind scepticism, successfully helped participants better distinguish between plausible and implausible conspiracy theories.’

Researchers used the Critical Thinking About Conspiracies assessment tool (CTAC) to assess how people use critical thinking specifically for conspiracies rather than solely measuring whether they believe in individual conspiracy theories such as the faking of the moon landing or conspiracies about the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The study focuses on four strategies for counteracting conspiracy beliefs: priming, inoculation, active inoculation, and discernment. 

The priming strategy involves warning people about the dangers of believing in unfounded conspiracy theories. This can happen in the form of nudge messages and is often used by government initiatives, including the UK Government’s “Don’t Feed The Beast” campaign during the Covid-19 pandemic to tackle misinformation. 

Inoculation strategies, often called pre-bunking, build on the priming strategy’s warning by including some common mistakes that conspiracy theorists make, such as using false experts or lacking corroborating evidence for their claims. The active inoculation method includes an additional step after the pre-punking: study participants are given a short quiz that allows them to put the information they have just received into action. 

Researchers used the CTAC to describe hypothetical conspiracy theories for the final method, discernment. The participants were given four responses and instructed to select the answer ‘that they believe best reflects what they think is the most reasonable interpretation of this conspiracy.’

The study’s concluding discussion states, ‘Our analysis produced the novel finding that many of the interventions that are well-established in the research literature have either no effect or a negative effect on participants’ ability to correctly reason about plausible conspiracy theories. Our findings suggest that many of the interventions designed to tackle unfounded conspiracy theories are effective in reducing susceptibility to implausible conspiracy theories but have no statistically significant effect in terms of increasing critical appraisal of plausible conspiracy theories.’

The researchers recommend that future studies measure the ability to discern conspiracy theories and design interventions that encourage discernment rather than blanket scepticism. Cian O’Mahony concluded, ‘Our results suggest that current techniques used widely by psychologists improve people’s critical thinking about implausible conspiracy theories but don’t help as much with plausible ones. As such, these interventions may be merely encouraging blind rejection of all conspiracy theories.’