Over the course of six months, a team of researchers surveyed nearly 500 Australians and New Zealanders to assess if people change their ideas regularly or hold to their beliefs despite new facts.
As part of the research, the participants were provided with 12 theories relating to claims about events that are under way or occurred during the past century, including the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, caused by controlled demolitions orchestrated by US government insiders, the implementation of 5G telecommunications technology, chemtrails, and the 2020 US Presidential election.
The work was released in the journal Scientific Reports.
The study’s most popular unwarranted conspiracy theory was that pharmaceutical companies have suppressed a cure for cancer to protect their profits, with 18% of the sample group agreeing when first asked.
The study highlighted that explanations for believing conspiracy theories must consider why belief levels differ significantly among individuals rather than within.
“This suggests that beliefs in conspiracy theories were highly stable in our sample. This stability implies that longitudinal studies testing hypotheses about the causes and consequences of belief in conspiracy theories may require large samples of participants and time points to achieve adequate power,” according to the study’s authors.
“It also implies that explanations of belief in conspiracy theories need to accommodate the observation that beliefs in such theories vary much more between people than within people.”
