![]() Conspiracy beliefs, as O’Mahony and his colleagues define them, include any beliefs that encompass malicious actors engaging in a secret plot that explains an important event. Misinformation is simply inaccurate information, while disinformation is deliberately misleading. Studies often blur the lines between conspiracy theory, disinformation and misinformation, O’Mahony says. The comparisons in the new review are a suggestive starting point, Jamieson adds, but shouldn’t be seen as the last word on conspiracy interventions. “There are so many different definitions and specifications of what is a conspiracy belief and a conspiracy mindset that it’s very difficult to aggregate this data in any way that permits generalization,” she says. But the field is so young that trying to compare individual studies is fraught, Jamieson says. And believers in COVID vaccine conspiracies put themselves at risk from the disease by refusing to get vaccinated. Capitol on January 6, 2021, believed the 2020 presidential election had been stolen, for example. It was published today in the journal PLOS ONE.Ĭounteracting conspiracy beliefs is important because beliefs in conspiracies can encourage people to act in harmful ways, says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communication and director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the new review. “We’re still in the early days, unfortunately, of having a silver bullet that will tackle misinformation as a whole,” says Cian O’Mahony, a doctoral student in psychology at University College Cork in Ireland, who led the study. ![]() ![]() ![]() The most promising ways to combat conspiratorial thinking seem to involve prevention, either warning people ahead of time about a particular conspiracy theory or explicitly teaching them how to spot shoddy evidence. The study is a review of research on attempts to counteract conspiratorial thinking, and it finds that common strategies that involve counterarguments and fact-checking largely fail to change people’s beliefs. When someone falls down a conspiracy rabbit hole, there are very few proved ways to pull them out, according to a new analysis. ![]()
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