A recent paper looks more closely at suspiciously high research estimates of conspiracy endorsement.
24 July 2026
By Emma Young
An alarming number of people believe conspiracy theories. At least, this is the conclusion drawn from a raft of recent research, with one study finding, for example, that 4% of the American participants endorsed the idea that shape-shifting reptilian people control the world. This led to controversial claims that about 12 million Americans believe it.
In a recent study in Collabra: Psychology, Robert M. Ross at Macquarie University set out to explore, though, whether people actually believe conspiracy theories that they endorse in studies. Their results suggest that we should be cautious about assuming that they do.
The researchers studied 1,044 Australians, who were first asked which of seven conspiracy theory statements were definitely or probably true or false, or whether they didn't know. Six of these were pre-existing conspiracy theories: that one or the other of two main political parties in Australia was planning on engaging in voter fraud to steal the next federal election; that the idea of man-made global warming is a hoax; that a secret group of Satan-worshipping paedophiles has taken control of parts of the Australian federal government and mainstream media; that governments are covering up the fact that 5G mobile networks spread Covid; that Covid is a myth created by some powerful forces and the virus doesn't really exist. (These last two were deliberately contradictory.)
The researchers also added a theory that they concocted to be deliberately bizarre: 'The Canadian armed forces have been secretly developing an elite army of genetically engineered, super intelligent, giant raccoons to invade nearby countries.'
After indicating whether they endorsed any of these statements, the participants were then asked whether they had responded randomly or insincerely at any point in the survey.
When the team analysed the data, they found a "remarkably consistent" pattern. Participants who didn't endorse the unlikely raccoon army theory were least likely to endorse each of the other conspiracy theories. Those who said they'd answered sincerely formed the next biggest group of people who tended not to endorse each of the genuine conspiracy theories, followed by those who'd admitted to some insincere responses. The researchers found the exact same group ordering for the participants who'd endorsed both of the contradictory Covid theories.
They also found that participants who endorsed the racoon theory on average endorsed four of the other six statements, while those who rejected the racoon theory endorsed an average of just 0.5 of them. The racoon-endorsers were also far more likely than the others to accept the contradictory conspiracy theories, with 55% endorsing them, compared with just 1.92% of the participants who thought the racoon theory was false.
In addition, the analysis revealed that overall, 1 in 10 participants endorsed the racoon army conspiracy theory. Just over a third of these people admitted to responding insincerely, compared with 11% of those that did not endorse the racoon army plot.
These results led the team to a number of conclusions. Firstly, though some other studies have claimed that belief in contradictory conspiracy theories is not uncommon, these results suggest a reframing of those findings: "many participants who endorse clearly contradictory conspiracy theories are not reporting sincere beliefs." The results also suggest that many people who say that they endorse wild conspiracy theories in a survey may not actually believe in those theories, either.
The researchers acknowledge that even if the racoon-endorsers were removed from the analysis, the other theories were supported by between 2% and 14% of the participants, however. "For this reason, our results are consistent with the possibility that a non-trivial proportion of participants sincerely believe some of the conspiracy theories that they endorsed," the researchers write.
They think the main takeaway is, though, that fewer people may believe conspiracy theories — and especially bizarre and clearly contradictory ones — than previous estimates have suggested. Researchers "need to get out of the habit of assuming that when participants endorse claims in surveys then they sincerely believe them; instead, they should seriously consider the possibility that they might not — especially when these claims are bizarre," the team argues.
In fact, they think their work flags a need for researchers investigating conspiracy theory endorsement to include a way of identifying deliberately insincere responding in their surveys, in the way that methods for identifying careless responding are already used.
Read the paper in full:
Ross, R. M., Ashton, L., Wilson, S., Gleeson, K., & Levy, N. (2026). Do people sincerely believe conspiracy theories that they endorse?. Collabra: Psychology, 12(1), 159253. https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.159253
SOURCE:
https://www.bps.org.uk/research-digest/do-people-really-believe-conspiracy-theories-they-say-they-do(accessed 14.8.26)
No comments:
Post a Comment