Overconfidence is a hallmark trait of people who believe in conspiracies, and they also significantly overestimate how much others agree with them, Cornell psychology researchers have found. 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, revealing they tend to be less analytic in the way they think. 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 and the Himan Brown Faculty Fellow in the College of Arts and Sciences. “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,” which was published May 24 in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Jabin Binnendyk, a doctoral student in psychology, and David G. Rand of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are co-authors.
Rand and Pennycook started this research in 2018, observing that people who believe conspiracies seem to have a real faith in their own cognitive abilities, “which is paradoxical,” Pennycook said, “because prior work has shown that people who believe in conspiracies tend to be more intuitive.”
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.”
Results of these four studies show an association between a tendency toward overconfidence and belief in conspiracies, indicating that a disposition to overrate one’s cognitive skills may play an important role in conspiracy beliefs.
“If overconfidence is an important component of conspiracy beliefs, then it is likely that believers do not realize that they are in the minority,” the researchers wrote. “In contrast, if conspiracy beliefs are more driven by need for uniqueness, then believers may well know that they are in the minority – in fact, they may revel in this fact.”
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. That is, conspiracy believers massively overestimated how much others agreed with them.
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.”
This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
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