Study claims conspiracy theorists will believe almost anything

A study released in Feburary 2015 titled “Science vs Conspiracy: Collective Narratives in the Age of Misinformation” shows that many conspiracy theorists will believe – or at least spread – almost anything, by fooling them into spreading absurd notions made up by the study’s authors themselves.

Our own readers will be more than aware that the popularity of social media has resulted in faster, more efficient and a more prolific spread of misinformation across the digital globe, which in turn has led to the increased popularity of sites like ourselves that expose such bunk.

A staple part of this misinformation consists of absurd conspiracy theories, that range from mind controlling “chemtrails” and a new World Order, to the Anti-Christ Obama (who was born in Kenya, apparently) and “false flag” school shootings staged to harness gun control.

A number of studies have sought to prove why conspiracy theorists believe what they do, and why these ideals spread so far. Such studies generally agree that such occurrences are largely down to a number of sociological and psychological phenomena.

Like other studies, the “Science vs Conspiracy: Collective Narratives in the Age of Misinformation” paper concluded that conspiracy theorists tend to stick largely to their own communities, preferring to interact with content related to their own conspiracy related interests, as opposed to more critical thinking counterparts who were more likely to interact with content outside of their specific interests.

However this study went a step further. During the testing stage, the Italian authors used “troll” statements in an attempt to fool both the followers of popular conspiracy theorist pages and the followers of the scientifically orientated pages.

Such troll statements (nearly 5000 in total) were ones clearly unsubstantiated, typically bordering on satirical. These included the notion that uranium fuelled desk lamps could help the environment, that lemons contained anti-hypnotic effects and that chem-trails contained sildenafil citratum, the active ingredient to Viagra.

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The study showed that the vast majority of positive social media feedback (in the form of likes, shares and comments) came from those who followed conspiracy theory related themes. 77.92% of likes and 80.86% of comments are from users who would usually interact with conspiracy theories.

Within the realms of social media, positive feedback in this manner is usually accepted as synonymous with endorsement, or at least an implied endorsement. Thus conspiracy theorists were essentially being fooled into endorsing completely unsupportable nonsense, highlighting an inability of – or reluctance to – the critical thinking process.

This highlights another phenomenon common amongst conspiracy theories that even we ourselves have witnessed numerous times, in that those who tend to believe in conspiracies are more likely to take reports at face value that are at least somewhat consistent to their own “trust nobody” belief system, even if those reports are entirely and wholly unsubstantiated – which of course the troll statements were.

But despite this lack of substantiation or validation, such erroneous reports were largely shared within conspiracy communities on social media, providing an illusion of authenticity provided purely on their popularity, not their scientific or logical merit.

Of course this goes some way into explaining why social media has found itself as the central quagmire of conspiracy theories and misinformation. But as the authors papers note, the study was not a test as to the validity of conspiracy theories, but merely a study as to how conspiracy theorists react to content related to their own interests, when compared to other communities.

Still though, it doesn’t look particularly good on the conspiracy inclined. The ultimate take home of the study – conspiracy theorists will believe practically anything, as long as it’s a conspiracy.

Read the paper here for a more in-depth look at the results and conclusions.

Do you believe in a conspiracy theory? Let us know below.