Brief scientific literacy interventions may quash new conspiracy theories

Penn State News/December 2, 2024

By Francisco Tutella

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The more time you spend on social media, the likelier you are to have come across a viral post that seems too strange to be true. Brief scientific literacy interventions, especially those that focus on critical thinking skills, may help to undermine conspiracy beliefs and behaviors before the conspiracy theories have a chance to take root, according to a team led by Penn State researchers.

The team published their findings in the Journal of Consumer Research.

“While some conspiracy beliefs may seem relatively harmless, others — about vaccines, genetically modified organisms and climate change, for example — pose risks to consumers and society,” said study co-author Lisa Bolton, professor of marketing and the Anchel Professor of Business Administration at Penn State’s Smeal College of Business.

The researchers conducted two studies in which they used national and international data to establish the connection between scientific literacy and conspiracy belief levels. They also conducted a series of eight science literacy studies, which included more than 2,700 participants in total, to determine how conspiracy beliefs can impact consumer actions and the effectiveness of scientific literacy to counteract such beliefs. They found that conspiracy beliefs — such as the ideas that agribusiness and big pharma are covering up the risks of genetically modified foods and vaccines, respectively — could affect what consumers choose to purchase or which medical procedures they decide to undergo.

They also found that brief interventions, like short videos focused on scientific knowledge and reasoning, undermined the conspiracy beliefs. The interventions were most effective against conspiracy theories built on faulty reasoning rather than narrative and against novel rather than entrenched conspiracies, even among high-conspiracy groups, according to the researchers.

The work suggests that educational interventions focused on expanding scientific knowledge and evidence evaluation skills can mitigate conspiracy beliefs, the researchers said.

“We need to get these interventions in front of people when they are facing important decisions. You can't rely on someone remembering a 3-minute video a year after they watch it, but a video in the waiting room of a doctor's office might be just in time,” said Nathan Allred, first author and assistant professor of marketing at Texas Tech University. Allred completed the work as part of his doctoral dissertation at Penn State.

In their initial studies, Allred and Bolton examined the relationship between conspiracy beliefs and scientific knowledge and reasoning. For instance, in one study they asked 299 participants to watch a 3-minute video — either explaining correlation and causation or on a completely unrelated topic — then read an article on a conspiracy theory about lab-grown meat. Then participants responded to prompts that measured their conspiracy beliefs, including being given one dollar and asked how much they would like to donate to a real charity that advocates for lab-grown meat to see how their conspiracy beliefs affected their behavior.

In these studies, the researchers found that participants were less likely to demonstrate behaviors indicating belief in the conspiracy after short scientific literacy interventions, especially ones that helped participants improve their evidence evaluation skills. These skills are especially helpful since they are applicable to most topic areas instead of being specific to one domain, the researchers said.

The latter studies looked at real-world assessments of how scientific literacy impacts conspiracy beliefs and behaviors. For example, in one study, the researchers wanted to see how COVID-19 conspiracy theories affected vaccination rates. They used science scores from the 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress — the most recent scores available — as a proxy to measure scientific literacy in the 44 states that participated in the assessment.

Then the researchers looked at responses to an American News Pathways 2020 Project assessment from June 10, 2020, that asked participants to state how strongly they agree or disagree with the statement “that powerful people intentionally planned the coronavirus outbreak.” They measured vaccination rates and the percentage of fully vaccinated adults per 100,000 people in these areas. The data spanned from April 15 to July 30, 2021.

They found that Americans in states with higher scientific literacy scores were less likely to believe in conspiracies and had higher COVID-19 vaccination uptake rates over the time period.

“Public health messaging during the COVID-19 pandemic was fairly messy,” Allred said. “From what we learned from our intervention studies, I believe a greater emphasis on explaining the science behind how we knew what was happening and what we should be doing about it would have curbed the spread of conspiracy theories.”

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