Exposure to conspiracy theories in the lab

Abstract

Conspiracy theories are widespread in the modern information era. Being exposed to conspiracy theories may affect behaviour, for example, by spreading mistrust among people and within organisations, even if it does not necessarily generate widespread beliefs in the conspiracy narrative. Our paper investigates the effect of exposure to conspiracy theories on strategic sophistication. We present evidence from a laboratory experiment, in which we prime half of our participants with exposure to a conspiracy theory. We find that such exposure leads to increased strategic sophistication. Using a causal mediation analysis we confirm that the effect on sophistication arises independently of whether people believe in the content or not.