The DOI matches its Crossref record; 46 of the 46 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Why Education Predicts Decreased Belief in Conspiracy Theories
Open accessAbstract
Summary: People with high education are less likely than people with low education to believe in conspiracy theories. It is yet unclear why these effects occur, however, as education predicts a range of cognitive, emotional, and social outcomes. The present research sought to identify mediators of the relationship between education and conspiracy beliefs. Results of Study 1 revealed three independent mediators of this relationship, namely, belief in simple solutions for complex problems, feelings of powerlessness, and subjective social class. A nationally representative sample (Study 2) replicated these findings except for subjective social class. Moreover, variations in analytic thinking statistically accounted for the path through belief in simple solutions. I conclude that the relationship between education and conspiracy beliefs cannot be reduced to a single mechanism but is the result of the complex interplay of multiple psychological factors that are associated with education. © 2016 The Authors. Applied Cognitive Psychology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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BackgroundCognitive Reflection and Decision Making
Frederick, S. (2005) · Journal of Economic Perspectives · doi:10.1257/089533005775196732 · Cited by 5,256
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Statistical mediation analysis with a multicategorical independent variable
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Cited by
Understanding Conspiracy Theories
Douglas, K. M., Uscinski, J. E., Sutton, R. M., Cichocka, A., Nefes, T., Ang, C. S., & Deravi, F. (2019) · Political Psychology · doi:10.1111/pops.12568 · Cited by 1,511
Susceptibility to misinformation about COVID-19 around the world
Roozenbeek, J., Schneider, C. R., Dryhurst, S., Kerr, J., Freeman, A. L. J., Recchia, G., van der Bles, A. M., & van der Linden, S. (2020) · Royal Society Open Science · doi:10.1098/rsos.201199 · Cited by 1,447
Science audiences, misinformation, and fake news
Scheufele, D. A., & Krause, N. M. (2019) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.1805871115 · Cited by 878
Imhoff, R., & Lamberty, P. (2020) · Social Psychological and Personality Science · doi:10.1177/1948550620934692 · Cited by 722
Belief in conspiracy theories: Basic principles of an emerging research domain
van Prooijen, J., & Douglas, K. M. (2018) · European Journal of Social Psychology · doi:10.1002/ejsp.2530 · Cited by 483
Self-citation
Metadata
- Authors
- van Prooijen, J.
- Venue
- Applied Cognitive Psychology
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2016-11-28
- Volume
- 31
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 50-58
- ISSN
- 0888-4080 (ISSN-L)
- 1099-0720
- OpenAlex
- W2557592378
- Cited by
- 517
- References
- 46
- FWCI
- 71.46
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
