Media release

From: PLOS

Why some individuals believe fake news and conspiracies

Mistrust is associated with conspiracy thinking and vaccine hesitancy

People who are credulous are less capable of recognizing fake news, and along with mistrustful adults, are more susceptible to conspiracy thinking and vaccine hesitancy, according to a study published December 4, 2024, in the open-access journal PLOS Global Public Health by Michal Tanzer and colleagues from University College London, U.K.

Epistemic trust is the readiness to regard knowledge communicated by others as significant, self-relevant, and generalizable to other contexts. Disruption to the capacity for epistemic trust may undermine healthy functioning that requires rapid, efficient checking and updating of social knowledge and underlie psychological disorders. Campbell and colleagues set out to investigate how the vulnerability engendered by disruptions in epistemic trust may not only impact psychological resilience and interpersonal processes but also aspects of more general social functioning.

Specifically, the researchers conducted two studies to examine the role of epistemic trust in determining the capacity to recognize fake versus real news, and susceptibility to conspiracy thinking. They measured two different types of epistemic disruption: mistrust, which involves the tendency to reject or avoid any communication, and credulity, in which information is received with insufficient discrimination, leaving the recipient vulnerable to misinformation or exploitation.

A total of 705 and 502 adults living in the U.K. participated in the two studies, respectively, and completed online questionnaires. The results revealed that individuals with high credulity were poorer at discriminating between fake and real news, and more likely to perceive fake news as real and affirm false news in relation to COVID-19. In addition, mistrust and credulity were factors responsible for driving the relationship between exposure to childhood adversity and difficulty in distinguishing between fake and real news, although the effect sizes were small.

The findings also showed that mistrust and credulity were associated with conspiracy beliefs, both in general and in relation to COVID-19, as well as vaccine hesitancy. Although the authors caution that it was not possible to determine causal relationships, the results suggest that effective public health interventions may need to directly tackle and attempt to reverse mistrust and credulity. Future studies are also necessary to explore whether the findings generalize to people who live in other countries.

The authors add: “The study sought to explore social-cognitive processes associated with two of the most urgent issues of global public health in the contemporary digital era: the alarming spread of fake news and the breakdown of collective trust in sources of information. Our research seeks to explore possible psychological mechanisms at work in shaping individuals’ responses to public information.”