Conspiracy Believers Underuse Social Information (Like Everyone Else)

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 generalized distrustful mindset. Conspiracy believers may be more permeable to social influence than they sometimes claim.