🚨New open access paper out in BJP special issue "Psychological Understanding of Misinformation and Disinformation in the Face of Environmental Crises"! “Fighting fire with fire: Prebunking with the use of a plausible meta-conspiracy framing” 🧵👇 1/12 📖 https://t.co/oJKwKOWwaz

Once again, the paper can be found open access here 👉 https://t.co/oJKwKOWwaz #Misinformation #ConspiracyTheories #Prebunking #ClimateChange #COVID19 12/12

I would like to thank my fantastic co-authors: @Psych_Green, @dtoribio8, @dylan_psych, Robbie M. Sutton, & @Karen_Douglas! 11/12

This adds nuance: interventions may not always need to disprove conspiracy theories outright. Sometimes, redirecting suspicion toward the real conspiracies behind misinformation might be enough 10/12

Implication: Even if we can’t directly reduce conspiracy beliefs, reframing them as the product of real, documented collusion to spread misinformation could engage resistant audiences and still support healthier, pro-social behaviour 9/12

And crucially: 🔥 “Fighting fire with fire” worked regardless of prior conspiracy mentality or climate beliefs. ⚠️ Standard prebunking only helped those lower in conspiracy mentality / higher in climate acceptance. 8/12

Importantly, meta-conspiracy beliefs were positively linked to intentions (e.g. vaccinating, reducing carbon footprint). Indirect path models showed positive indirect effects of our intervention on these intentions via meta-conspiracy beliefs 7/12

Results: ❌ Did not reduce belief in specific conspiracy theories. ✅ Increased belief in plausible meta-conspiracies. ✅ Did not backfire—no increase in conspiracy beliefs. ✅ Meta-conspiracy beliefs were negatively correlated with specific conspiracy beliefs 6/12

Two preregistered studies tested this: Study 1: COVID-19 vaccine conspiracy theories (N = 720) Study 2: Climate change conspiracy theories (N = 1077) 5/12

Why this approach? Because awareness of such meta-conspiracies may sow doubt about original conspiracy theories among conspiracy believers by offering an alternative conspiacy narrative 4/12

Enter: Fighting fire with fire. Instead of only warning about manipulation, we introduced plausible meta-conspiracies—that conspiracy theories themselves are deliberately spread through secret collusion (e.g. fossil fuel companies, hostile states) to mislead the public 3/12

Standard prebunking warns people about manipulation, but what if those with entrenched conspiracy beliefs are more resistant to this intervention messaging? We asked: could a different style of prebunking work better? 2/12

Read the full open access paper here:

Our recent paper on improving AOT and reducing #misinformation susceptibility with prebunking (@RakoenMaertens, @Sander_vdLinden et al.) was picked up by @PsyPost!

Our article "Norm-enhanced prebunking for actively open-minded thinking indirectly improves misinformation discernment and reduces conspiracy beliefs" has now been published open access in @JExpSocPsych! @RakoenMaertens @Sander_vdLinden https://t.co/bBiFbIM5VF 🧵👇

The paper is open access, and the videos can be downloaded from this OSF link: https://t.co/E65TfEqHMD 16/16 https://t.co/xgUdqLKmhf

We would like to thank @PolPsyISPP for their impressive peer-review process, as well as @AUKCabOffice and @dfatirl for their funding. I would also like to thank my co-authors for their incredible work on this project! 15/16

We hope that others use these videos to run prebunking campaigns aiming to improve people’s detection of polarization, conspiracy theories, fake experts, the straw man fallacy, whataboutism, and the moving the goalposts fallacy 14/16

While we urge caution when presenting the moving the goalposts fallacy video, we suggest that this video is still likely to have a positive impact with a need to test this video with a standardised item rating task 13/16

The motivation to resist manipulation was significantly higher in the prebunking conditions compared to the control in Study 2. 12/16