No evidence that priming analytic thinking reduces belief in conspiracy theories: A Registered Report of high-powered direct replications of Study 2 and Study 4 from Swami, Voracek, Stieger, Tran, and Furnham (2014)

Abstract

Analytic thinking is reliably associated with lower belief in conspiracy theories. However, evidence for whether increasing analytic thinking can reduce belief in conspiracies is sparse. As an exception to this, Swami et al. (2014) showed that priming analytical thinking through a verbal fluency task (i.e., scrambled sentence task) or a processing fluency manipulation (i.e., difficult-to-read fonts) reduced belief in conspiracy theories. To probe the robustness of these effects, in this Registered Report, we present two highly powered (i.e., 95%) direct replications of two of the original studies (i.e., Studies 2 and 4). We found no evidence that priming analytic thinking through the scrambled sentence task (N = 302), nor the difficult-to-read fonts (N = 488) elicited more analytic thinking, nor reduced belief in conspiracy theories. This work highlights the need for further research to identify effective ways of inducing analytic thinking in order to gauge its potential causal impact on belief in conspiracies.