Department of Politics, University of Exeter.
Department of Political Science, Stony Brook University.
Health Commun. 2019 Dec;34(14):1741-1750. doi: 10.1080/10410236.2018.1530526. Epub 2018 Oct 11.
While conspiracy ideation has attracted overdue attention from social scientists in recent years, little work focuses on how different pro-conspiracy messages affect the take-up of conspiracy beliefs. In this study, we compare the effect of explicit and implicit conspiracy cues on the adoption of conspiracy beliefs. We also examine whether corrective information can undo conspiracy cues, and whether there are differences in the effectiveness of corrective information based on whether a respondent received an explicit or implicit conspiracy cue. We examine these questions using a real-world but low-salience conspiracy theory concerning Zika, GM mosquitoes, and vaccines. Using a preregistered experiment ( = 1018: https://osf.io/hj2pw/), we find that both explicit and implicit conspiracy cues increase conspiracy beliefs, but in both cases corrections are generally effective. We also find reception of an explicit conspiracy cue and its correction is conditional on feelings toward the media and pharmaceutical companies. Finally, we find that examining open-ended conspiracy belief items reveals similar patterns, but with a few key differences. These findings have implications for how news media cover controversial public health issues going forward.
虽然阴谋论思想近年来引起了社会科学家的关注，但很少有研究关注不同的支持阴谋论的信息如何影响阴谋信念的接受。在这项研究中，我们比较了明确和隐含的阴谋线索对阴谋信念接受的影响。我们还研究了纠正信息是否可以消除阴谋线索，以及基于接收者是否接收到明确或隐含的阴谋线索，纠正信息的有效性是否存在差异。我们使用一个真实但低关注度的关于寨卡病毒、转基因蚊子和疫苗的阴谋论来检验这些问题。通过一项预先注册的实验（n=1018：https://osf.io/hj2pw/），我们发现明确和隐含的阴谋线索都会增加阴谋信念，但在这两种情况下，纠正信息通常是有效的。我们还发现，接收明确的阴谋线索及其纠正与对媒体和制药公司的看法有关。最后，我们发现，对开放式的阴谋信念项目的研究揭示了相似的模式，但也存在一些关键差异。这些发现对新闻媒体今后如何报道有争议的公共卫生问题具有启示意义。
