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Transcript:
Hello there, and welcome to my YouTube channel. My name is Trevor.
Well, okay, that’s not my birth name. That would be Rebecca. “Trevor” is the name bestowed upon me by my bros. You see, many years ago one member of a group of my girlfriends was having some trouble gathering the confidence to get out on the dating scene and meet new people in an active way, despite the fact that she was (and is) gorgeous, extremely smart, and wildly funny. She accepted that WE all thought of her in those ways but she had trouble truly accepting it enough to feel secure approaching others to date.
In a moment of frustration, I recommended that, as a thought experiment, she take on the persona of a mediocre white man. Because all of us had experienced times, usually in the professional world, where it seemed that certain people had a lot of confidence relative to their skill level, and that confidence often made up for that lack of skill. It was a positive trait that may have come naturally to them but, we suspected, could be learned.
Our friend wanted to give it a go, and so we Christened her “Chad.” She wanted company, so each of us was duly renamed, and off we went to the bars, where I am happy to say that Chad experienced great success. For the purposes of privacy I’ll leave it there.
I’m thinking of all this now because, well, in part because this group continues to refer to one another by our “bro” names, but also because of a new study that specifically looks at the role of confidence in one of my favorite topics: conspiracy theories.
“Overconfidently Conspiratorial: Conspiracy Believers are Dispositionally Overconfident and Massively Overestimate How Much Others Agree With Them” was recently published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. The lead author is Gordon Pennycook, a psychology professor at Cornell University, and whose work I’ve enjoyed for quite some time now. Way back in 2015, my friend and statistician Jamie Bernstein related another study he had completed in which he showed participants various supposed aphorisms from Deepak Chopra alongside randomly generated nonsensical statements made by an online Deepak Chopra quote generator. He found that, as Jamie put it, “people who are more likely to rate a meaningless statement as profound are the same people who are more likely to have high religiosity, believe in the supernatural, believe in conspiracy theories, and think that alternative medicines such as homeopathy and reiki are totally legit. Additionally, the people who generally do better on analytical tests also tend to be more skeptical when presented with meaningless sentences made up of buzzwords.”
Jamie pointed out some issues she had with that study, like how it conflated religiosity with a belief in entities like angels and demons, which would preclude a lot of religious people. She also pointed out that there’s a good chance that you could get a similar result if you showed more “sciencey” sounding quotes to science-minded people and told them they came from Carl Sagan, a hypothesis that as far as I know has yet to be tested. Unfortunately. Because that could get really funny.
Anyway, in this new study, Pennycook surveyed more than 4,000 American adults across eight different studies, asking them how they feel about certain conspiracy theories and testing them on their numeracy and perception. He found that conspiracy theory believers were consistently overly confident in their performance on those tests, and that was regardless of how they actually did on the test as well as regardless of their analytical thinking abilities, their narcissism, or their desire to be unique little snowflakes. The more fringe the conspiracy theory, the more overly confident the respondent was.
The even MORE interesting finding, in my opinion, is that “conspiracy believers—particularly overconfident ones—massively overestimated (>4×) how much others agree with them: Although conspiratorial claims were believed by a majority of participants only 12% of the time, believers thought themselves to be in the majority 93% of the time. This was evident even when asked to rate agreement among counter-partisans, indicating that conspiracists are genuinely unaware that their beliefs are on the fringe.”
I find that fascinating, because in popular culture–think the X-Files, for instance–conspiracy theorists are often portrayed as those who are proud to hold special knowledge that remains hidden from normies. And I think–I THINK, based on my own anecdotal observations that could very well be wrong–that there was some truth to that portrayal. People like Alex Jones and Art Bell before him used to brag about knowing the secret things the elites were getting up to, and lament that the rest of the world was too coddled or stupid to get it. Like, “woke” may be a rightwing anathema these days but back then they would wonder when everyone else was going to wake up to the realization that there are, say, lizard people running the Earth.
I don’t know if that general attitude was ever actually the majority, and if it was, if it’s changed over time. But I found Pennycook’s latest study thanks to my friend Jennifer Ouellette, who wrote about it for Ars Technica. She asked him how his results gibe with conspiracy theorists’ “desire to be unique,” to which Pennycook had a good reply:
“In general, people who believe conspiracies often have contrary beliefs. We’re working with a population where coherence is not to be expected. They say that they’re in the majority, but it’s never a strong majority. They just don’t think that they’re in a minority when it comes to the belief. Take the case of the Sandy Hook conspiracy, where adherents believe it was a false flag operation. In one sample, 8 percent of people thought that this was true. That 8 percent thought 61 percent of people agreed with them.
“So they’re way off. They really, really miscalibrated. But they don’t say 90 percent. It’s 60 percent, enough to be special, but not enough to be on the fringe where they actually are. I could have asked them to rank how smart they are relative to others, or how unique they thought their beliefs were, and they would’ve answered high on that. But those are kind of mushy self-concepts. When you ask a specific question that has an objectively correct answer in terms of the percent of people in the sample that agree with you, it’s not close.”
I know in the past I have talked about studies that show conspiracy theorists incredible ability to hold two conflicting ideas at once. I mean, that’s just a human trait, but conspiracy theorists truly take it to the next level. For instance, this study showed that the more people believed that Princess Diana faked her own death, the more they believed that she was purposely murdered.
So it doesn’t surprise me to hear that maybe conspiracy theorists today manage to think of themselves as uniquely smart and perceptive, while also thinking that a slim majority of the world agrees with them.
Ouellette also pointed to another study from Pennycook that I missed. Last year, he published a study showing that a chatbot could talk people out of believing in conspiracy theories. You can even play with the “DebunkBot” to test your own beliefs, though first you have to, um, prove you aren’t a robot. No robots talking to other robots, you guys. But yeah, he found that this specially tuned bot “reduced participants’ belief in their chosen conspiracy theory (which included the JFK assassination, aliens, the illuminati, and topical conspiracies about COVID-19 and the 2020 US presidential election) by 20% on average. This effect persisted undiminished for at least 2 months.”
Ouellette asked Pennycook if his bot from last year’s study could help the overconfident conspiracy believers in this study, and he was pessimistic. The chatbot worked because the people in last year’s study wanted to engage with it and talk about their pet conspiracy, but extremely overconfident people aren’t like that. The entire problem with people who are overly confident is that they go into a discussion assuming they are right and any countering facts must by definition be incorrect. Because they’re so smart and right.
Pennycook suggests that the only way to change their minds might be to do “sort of propagandistic sit-them-downs with their eyes open and try to de-convert them.” Yes, I’m sure the conspiracy theorists will love that quote. They’re signing up for the procedure right now. Get the toothpicks ready.
I was happy to see that Pennycook refuses to castigate overconfidence across the board: “ It also doesn’t have to be maladaptive. It’s maladaptive when it comes to beliefs. But you want people to think that they will be successful when starting new businesses. A lot of them will fail, but you need some people in the population to take risks that they wouldn’t take if they were thinking about it in a more rational way. So it can be optimal at a population level, but maybe not at an individual level.”
I couldn’t agree more! If you have a friend group with a few under-confident people, don’t let this research turn you off from encouraging them (on a population level?) to, you know, adopt an entirely different, more privileged, and dare I say cockier persona. It worked for Chad. Just be sure to bring them back down to Earth once that business is up and running or they have that person’s phone number.
