ITHACA, N.Y. – Overconfidence is a hallmark trait of people who believe in conspiracies, and they also significantly overestimate how much others agree with them, Cornell University research finds. The study indicates that belief in conspiracies may be less about a person's needs and motivations and more about their failure to recognize that they might be wrong.
Conspiracy believers not only consistently overestimated their performance on numeracy and perception tests, they also are genuinely unaware that their beliefs are on the fringe, thinking themselves to be in the majority 93% of the time, according to the research. The work counters previous theories that people believe conspiracies essentially because they want to, out of narcissism or to appear unique.
"This group of people are really miscalibrated from reality," said Gordon Pennycook , associate professor of psychology. "In many cases, they believe something that very few people agree with. Not only is it something that doesn't make a lot of sense, based on what we know about the world, but they also have no idea how far out in the fringe they are. They think they are in the majority in most cases, even if they're in a tiny minority.
Pennycook is the corresponding author of " Overconfidently Conspiratorial: Conspiracy Believers are Dispositionally Overconfident and Massively Overestimate How Much Others Agree with Them, " published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
The researchers conducted eight studies with 4,181 U.S. adults. Four studies assessed participants' levels of overconfidence using tests of perception, numeracy and cognitive reflection. Because overconfidence is difficult to measure – those who are the most incompetent are the least able to recognize their own incompetence, Pennycook said – the researchers used a new measurement approach to account for this effect. Rather than completing specific tests with measurable outcomes, participants were given tasks where actual performance and their perceived performances were unrelated, such as quickly discerning an image so obscured, they essentially have to guess what it is.
"Participants have little reason to believe that they did well – allowing higher estimated performance to more directly index higher levels of trait overconfidence without being confounded by actual performance," the researchers wrote.
The studies then measured conspiracy beliefs by asking direct questions about popular – but false – conspiracy claims, including "the Apollo moon landings never happened and were staged in a Hollywood film studio," "Princess Diana's death was not an accident," and "Dinosaurs never existed."
Another four studies tested the study participants' perceptions of others' beliefs and found that overconfidence predicted both belief in conspiracies and the tendency to overestimate how much others believe in false conspiracies. On average, a minority of participants believed in the false conspiracies. Even so, they thought that a majority of others agreed with them in each study.
Conspiracy belief is a growing issue, thanks to an "expanded marketplace for conspiracy theories" online and on social media platforms, Pennycook said.
However, the propensity to think most other people share these beliefs creates challenges for efforts to undermine false beliefs in conspiracies, the researchers wrote: "The people who most need help distinguishing truth from falsity are the least likely to recognize that they need it."
