10/05/2025
People are often more likely to believe lies or conspiracy theories than truth when those lies are familiar, emotional, identity-consistent, or repeated — and the effect persists even when they know better.
1. The more often people see or hear a claim (online, in media, or social circles), the more likely they are to believe it — regardless of truth.
Hasher, L., Goldstein, D., & Toppino, T. (1977). Frequency and the conference of referential validity. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 16(1), 107–112.
Fazio, L. K., et al. (2015). Knowledge does not protect against illusory truth. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144(5), 993–1002.
2. False news spreads six times faster on Twitter than true news, largely because it evokes surprise, anger, or fear.
Pennycook, G., & Rand, D. G. (2018). The Implied Truth Effect: Attaching warnings to a subset of fake news stories increases perceived accuracy of stories without warnings. Management Science, 66(11), 4944–4957.
Vosoughi, S., Roy, D., & Aral, S. (2018). The spread of true and false news online. Science, 359(6380), 1146–1151.
3. People often double down on false beliefs when shown factual corrections — a phenomenon called the backfire effect. Identity protection: Beliefs that align with one’s group identity are defended even when evidence contradicts them.
K***a, Z. (1990). The case for motivated reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 108(3), 480–498.
Nyhan, B., & Reifler, J. (2010). When corrections fail: The persistence of political misperceptions. Political Behavior, 32(2), 303–330.
4. Belief in one conspiracy theory predicts belief in others — even contradictory ones. People who feel powerless, anxious, or distrustful of authority are more likely to adopt conspiracy thinking.
van Prooijen, J. W., & Douglas, K. M. (2017). Conspiracy theories as part of history: The role of societal crisis situations. Memory Studies, 10(3), 323–333.
Douglas, K. M., et al. (2019). Understanding conspiracy theories. Political Psychology, 40(S1), 3–35.
