Department of Psychology, University of Warwick, United Kingdom.
Department of Psychology, University of Warwick, United Kingdom.
Cognition. 2022 Jan;218:104956. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104956. Epub 2021 Nov 20.
People who strongly endorse conspiracy theories typically exhibit biases in domain-general reasoning. We describe an overfitting hypothesis, according to which (a) such theories overfit conspiracy-related data at the expense of wider generalisability, and (b) reasoning biases reflect, at least in part, the need to reduce the resulting dissonance between the conspiracy theory and wider data. This hypothesis implies that reasoning biases should be more closely associated with belief in implausible conspiracy theories (e.g., the moon landing was faked) than with more plausible ones (e.g., the Russian Federation orchestrated the attack on Sergei Skripal). In two pre-registered studies, we found that endorsement of implausible conspiracy theories, but not plausible ones, was associated with reduced information sampling in an information-foraging task and with less reflective reasoning. Thus, the relationship between belief in conspiracy theories and reasoning is not homogeneous, and reasoning is not linked specifically to the "conspiracy" aspect of conspiracy theories. Instead, it may reflect an adaptive response to the tension between implausible theories and other beliefs and data.
强烈支持阴谋论的人通常表现出领域一般性推理的偏见。我们描述了一个过拟合假设，根据该假设，（a）这些理论以牺牲更广泛的通用性为代价，过分拟合与阴谋有关的数据，以及（b）推理偏见至少部分反映了减少阴谋论与更广泛的数据之间不和谐的需要。这个假设意味着推理偏见应该与对不可信的阴谋论（例如，登月是伪造的）的信仰更密切相关，而不是与更可信的阴谋论（例如，俄罗斯联邦策划了对谢尔盖·斯克里帕尔的袭击）更密切相关。在两项预先注册的研究中，我们发现，不可信的阴谋论的支持，而不是可信的阴谋论的支持，与信息采集任务中的信息采样减少和反思性推理减少有关。因此，对阴谋论的信仰与推理之间的关系不是同质的，推理也不是与阴谋论的“阴谋”方面具体相关。相反，它可能反映了对不可信理论与其他信仰和数据之间的紧张关系的适应性反应。
