How (Ir)rational is it to believe in contradictory conspiracy theories?
Open accessAbstract
There is evidence that not only believing in one conspiracy theory (CT) makes a person more probable to believe in others, however unrelated their content is, but that people can even believe in contradictory CTs about a single event. After piloting locally relevant conspiracy theories on a convenient Serbian speaking sample (N = 152), we sought to replicate this finding on a larger sample (N = 252), but introduced several changes. We differentiated necessarily and probably mutually exclusive CTs, and interviewed the participants who answered contradictory to understand the reasoning behind it. The participants were more prone to endorse probably than necessarily exclusive items (we registered positive correlations in former and no correlation or negative correlation in later). Two strategies enabled them to overcome the contradiction: (a) distilling the crucial content and downplaying other information and (b) treating the contradictory scenarios as possible versions of events. Taken together, these results indicate that participants are not as irrational as sometimes portrayed.
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Participants were more likely to believe conspiracy theories that aligned with their party's political stances and vilified the opposite party.
“participants were more likely to believe conspiracy theories that aligned with their party's political stances and vilified the opposite party [39][40][41]48,49,50].”
From The dark side of social movements: social identity, non-conformity, and the lure of conspiracy theories (2020) · cites this paper as [41]
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- Authors
- Lukić, P., Žeželj, I., & Stanković, B.
- Affiliations
- University of Belgrade (RS)
- Corresponding author
- Lukić, Petar
- Venue
- Europe’s Journal of Psychology
- Published
- 2019-02-28
- Volume
- 15
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 94-107
- ISSN
- 1841-0413 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC6396697
- OpenAlex
- W2919352849
- Cited by
- 59
- References
- 27
- Citations by year
- 2026: 5 · 2025: 4 · 2024: 6 · 2023: 11 · 2022: 11 · 2021: 12 · 2020: 7 · 2019: 2
- FWCI
- 16.10
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- diamond
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- Europe’s Journal of Psychology (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PsychOpen Gold (Leibniz Institute for Psychology) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Faculty of Philosophy (University of Belgrade) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Europe’s Journal of Psychology (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Psychology Archives (cc-by)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Paranormal Experiences and Beliefs
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Social and Intergroup Psychology
- Keywords
- conspiracy theories, contradictory beliefs, irrationality, replication, reasoning strategies, cognitive dissonance
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