A recent study from Cornell University has found that overconfidence is a hallmark trait of people who believe in conspiracies. According to the research, individuals who hold conspiracy beliefs significantly overestimate how much others agree with them, believing they are in the majority even when they are part of a tiny minority.
Gordon Pennycook, an associate professor of psychology and the corresponding author of the study, highlighted the disconnect between conspiracy believers and reality. "This group of people are really miscalibrated from reality," he said. "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."
The study, titled "Overconfidently Conspiratorial: Conspiracy Believers are Dispositionally Overconfident and Massively Overestimate How Much Others Agree with Them," was published in the *Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin*. The researchers conducted eight studies involving 4,181 U.S. adults to explore the link between overconfidence and conspiracy beliefs.
Four of these studies assessed participants' levels of overconfidence using tests of perception, numeracy, and cognitive reflection. Recognizing that overconfidence is difficult to measure, the researchers employed a new approach. Participants were given tasks where actual performance and perceived performance were unrelated—such as quickly discerning heavily obscured images, essentially forcing them to guess.
"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 measured conspiracy beliefs by asking direct questions about popular but false conspiracy claims. Examples included assertions like "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."
Another four studies tested the participants' perceptions of others' beliefs. The findings revealed that overconfidence predicted both belief in conspiracies and the tendency to overestimate how much others believe in false conspiracies. On average, only a minority of participants believed in the false conspiracies. Despite this, participants thought that a majority of others agreed with them in each study.
Pennycook noted the growing issue of conspiracy belief, especially with the expansion of online platforms. "Conspiracy belief is a growing issue, thanks to an expanded marketplace for conspiracy theories online and on social media platforms," he said.
The researchers expressed concern over the implications of their findings. "The people who most need help distinguishing truth from falsity are the least likely to recognize that they need it," they wrote.
The preparation of this article relied on a news-analysis system.