Rejecting conspiracies doesn't necessarily mean that you're smart: The relationship between conspiracy discrimination and reasoning ability

Abstract

Research examining the psychological predictors of conspiracy belief has overwhelmingly examined conspiracies that are unverified and/or implausible. Doing so potentially conflates ‘rational’ thinking with the tendency to heuristically reject conspiracist explanations. In three studies, we take a different approach, examining the predictors of the accuracy with which people can discriminate between unverified conspiracy theories and verified conspiracies (i.e. conspiracies that form part of the official record). The ability to discriminate between unverified and verified conspiracies was consistently higher among those with greater cognitive sophistication, as well as among political liberals, those lower in conspiracy mentality, and those with higher trust in experts, whereas associations with demographic variables were mixed. Conspiracy discrimination was also a much stronger predictor of cognitive sophistication than heuristic acceptance of conspiracy claims (response bias). In fact, good discriminators outperformed those who heuristically reject conspiracies (‘Indiscriminate Sceptics’) and those who heuristically endorse conspiracies (‘Indiscriminate Believers’) on each measure of cognitive sophistication. These findings challenge the idea that rejecting conspiracies is necessarily a sign of superior reasoning.