“Effectiveness of Methods to Combat Conspiracy Theories: A Summary of 25 Studies”

A summary of 25 studies on the subject concludes that most of the methods used have little effect, and those that do are very difficult to put into practice. Among the latter are those that can be described as preventive: warning people in advance of a conspiracy theory, or teaching them to recognize dubious arguments or “evidence” that is not.

The four psychologists attached to two Irish universities who are behind this study were looking for evidence of the effectiveness of these methods. They found 25 studies, which is few compared to the literature of the last decade on disinformation: but it turns out that the majority of the research focuses specifically on fake news – what defines it, how it spreads, why people believe in it, etc.—whereas a conspiracy theory is a more complex phenomenon: a phenomenon that involves an amalgamation of falsehoods, half-truths and true things, an amalgamation which, to the person who believes it, seems plausible.

Moreover, believing in the existence of a huge group of people capable of hiding the “truth” makes it easier to convince oneself that anyone who criticizes the theory is themselves part of the conspiracy. In fact, one of the 25 studies specifically concludes that labeling a theory as conspiratorial reinforces the beliefs of those who adhere to it.

By contrast, improving people’s skills to recognize pitfalls has a measurable impact, as does ” unbolt in advance ” (in English, prebunking) a theory to which the person has not yet been exposed. But the difficulty is knowing who to target and when..

And there’s no guarantee that the arguments that have carried over with one theory—for example, that a secret group wants to implant microchips in us through the vaccine—will work with another—for example, Russian disinformation targeting Ukrainian refugees. On the other hand, since the mechanisms of these theories all have points in common, training on a larger scale could be appropriate: one of the studies, whose success the authors of the synthesis of studies praise, consisted of a three-month university course, during which the participants learned, among other things, what distinguishes a solid science from a pseudoscience. But few people will enroll in a three-month university course, agrees lead authorpsychologist Cian O’Mahony.

However, the bar should not necessarily be set too high, comments psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky, who was not involved in this research but has been analyzing the mechanisms of false beliefs in science for more than a decade. For him, the fact that an intervention has only a low impact can still make a significant difference: “reducing the sharing of a conspiracy theory at the beginning, by just a few percentage points, can be enough to deflect a waterfall.