Conspiracy theorists are overconfident and overestimate how many people share their beliefs.
New research from Cornell University, in the United States, found that belief in conspiracies may be less about a person’s needs and motivations and more about their failure to recognize that they may be wrong.
Associate Professor Gordon Pennycook said their study found overconfidence was a hallmark trait of people who believed in conspiracies.
Associate Professor Pennycook said they also significantly overestimated how much others agreed with them.
“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 percent of the time.”
He said the work counters previous theories that people believed conspiracies essentially because they wanted to, out of narcissism or to appear unique.
“This group of people are really mis-calibrated from reality. In many cases, they believe something that very few people agree with.”
Associate Professor Pennycook said their analysis was a result of eight studies involving 4181 adults over more than seven years.
Read the full study: Overconfidently Conspiratorial: Conspiracy Believers are Dispositionally Overconfident and Massively Overestimate How Much Others Agree With Them.
