Authority brings responsibility: feedback from experts promotes an overweighting of health-related pseudoscientific beliefs

Abstract

The popularity and spread of health-related pseudoscientific practices is a worldwide problem. Despite being counteracted by competent agents of our societies, their prevalence and spread are still growing. Current research has focused on identifying which characteristics make us more likely to hold beliefs in favor of pseudoscience. However, how we hold these beliefs despite all the available information against them is a question that remains unanswered. We here aimed to assess if the development of health-related pseudoscience beliefs could be driven by a positive bias in belief updating. Additionally, we aimed to explore whether this bias could be exacerbated depending on source credibility. In this study, participants (N = 116 adult university students) underwent a belief updating task where they offered their agreement with various health-related pseudoscientific statements before and after receiving supporting and discrediting feedback from (a) experts (doctors) (b) peers or (c) a random number generator. Our results suggest that when receiving feedback from experts (but not from peers or random feedback) participants preferentially integrated supporting relative to discrediting information about health-related pseudoscientific proposals. We discuss the implications of this biased belief updating pattern on health-related pseudoscience research and suggest new strategies for intervention focused on increasing awareness, training, and consensus among healthcare practitioners.