Are conspiracy theory believes permanent? A new study suggests that belief in these ideas can change, offering possibilities of more intervention.
When we think about a person who believes one or multiple conspiracy theories, we tend to think of someone with relatively stable and fixed beliefs. In the public, this is one of the things that makes dealing with conspiracy theories so difficult, that they’re seemingly stubborn and can’t be dislodged.
But is that really true? What does the research say about the stability of conspiracy theory beliefs over time? For one thing, there’s not a ton of research on this question, but there are some clues in the literature. For example,studied conspiracy theory beliefs at two time points across four months with a specific examination of COVID-related conspiracy beliefs. This study found a large correlation between original and post-survey scores, suggesting that conspiracy theory beliefs remained relatively stable.
All of the research on this question, up to this point, has suggested that conspiracy theory beliefs and even conspiracy mentality are relatively stable over time. This is consistent with what we generally know about people— they don’t usually change their minds.suggests there may be reason to question this assumption. In this study, published in February, the authors looked at conspiracy theory beliefs over a longer time period .
This study had several limitations. It was not a random sample; it may be difficult to generalize the findings. In addition, the period of six months is still not that long and suggests we may need to do longer-term studies of conspiracy theory beliefs. This was not a huge sample and may need to be repeated with a larger group of participants. In addition, we don’t yet know if the results are generalizable outside of New Zealand and Australia.
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