How Stable Are Conspiracy Theory Beliefs?

When we think about a person who believes one or multiple conspiracy theories, we tend to think of someone with relatively stable and fixed beliefs. In the public imagination, this is one of the things that makes dealing with conspiracy theories so difficult, that they’re seemingly stubborn and can’t be dislodged.

But is that really true? What does the research say about the stability of conspiracy theory beliefs over time?

For one thing, there’s not a ton of research on this question, but there are some clues in the literature. For example, Romer and Jamieson studied conspiracy theory beliefs at two time points across four months with a specific examination of COVID-related conspiracy beliefs. This study found a large correlation between original and post-survey scores, suggesting that conspiracy theory beliefs remained relatively stable. Jolley and colleagues found something similar studying conspiracy beliefs about Brexit across two time points one week apart.

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Other studies across more than two time points have similar findings about the strong correlation of conspiracy beliefs over time, including one study about COVID-19 origin conspiracy theories across five time points and another in Poland looking at COVID conspiracy beliefs across four time points. One study that looked at general conspiracy mentality (as opposed to specific conspiracy theory beliefs) across four time points found similarly high correlations.

All of the research on this question, up to this point, has suggested that conspiracy theory beliefs and even conspiracy mentality are relatively stable over time. This is consistent with what we generally know about people— they don’t usually change their minds.

Question the assumption
But a new study suggests there may be reason to question this assumption. In this study, published in February, the authors looked at conspiracy theory beliefs over a longer time period (six months). The same set of participants recruited into the study was asked about different conspiracy theory beliefs across seven time points across six months. The study included 498 people in New Zealand and Australia. Conspiracy theories tested included many health-related items, such as the belief in a chip in COVID-19 vaccines and the notion that pharmaceutical companies are withholding cancer cures from the public. Ultimately the study found a low level of change in individual participants’ conspiracy beliefs over time. Although they note that the majority of people maintained stable beliefs, the fact that there was change over time suggests that we may need to reassess our assumption that these beliefs are uniformly stable.

This study had several limitations. It was not a random sample; it may be difficult to generalize the findings. In addition, the period of six months is still not that long and suggests we may need to do longer-term studies of conspiracy theory beliefs. This was not a huge sample (498 participants) and may need to be repeated with a larger group of participants. In addition, we don’t yet know if the results are generalizable outside of New Zealand and Australia. This suggests that this kind of study needs to be repeated. In the meantime, we should check our beliefs that conspiracy thinking is a permanent phenomenon and start to entertain the notion that these ideas could be more fluid than we thought. If this is the case, it opens up the possibility of more successful interventions to change conspiracy thinking. If we can understand when and how conspiracy beliefs tend to change, we can target interventions to help people transition away from these beliefs at times when their thought patterns are prone to change. This would be a great boon to our efforts to promote rational, evidence-based thinking across the population.