Across dividing lines: Identifying the interpersonal, group, and socio-cultural causes of unfounded beliefs and preventing their negative outcomes

Annotation: The World Economic Forum identified the spread of disinformation and unfounded beliefs (UBs) as a critical global risk. UBs, including belief in conspiracy theories or pseudoscience, are associated with many negative psychological and societal outcomes, emphasizing the need to understand their causes. While extant research primarily focuses on individual cognitive-motivational drivers of UBs, social causes remain largely unexplored. Also, current knowledge of UBs is built mostly on correlational studies, which restricts our understanding of the causes and consequences of UBs and limits the efforts to design effective interventions. Our project aims to fill these gaps by combining correlational, experimental, and longitudinal studies, as well as analyses of multi-national datasets to identify interpersonal, group and socio-cultural causes of UBs. We will achieve this by analyzing causal pathways between social factors (e.g. quality of interpersonal relationships, social norms, intergroup threats), UBs and their negative outcomes and by examining interactions of social (group identity, collective narcissism) and individual (analytic thinking, spirituality) causes of UBs. These findings will be used to design novel interventions to reduce UBs and prevent their negative outcomes by targeting social factors (social norms, intergroup emotions), as well as to examine how existing interventions (e.g. debunking) can be improved by factoring in the social causes of UBs. The project’s theoretical contribution lies in identifying causal chains between social factors, UBs and their negative outcomes and uncovering socio-cultural factors that shape them. Practical implications will involve development of cost-effective and scalable interventions targeting social causes of UBs, improving the effectiveness of existing interventions by tailoring them to different segments of population, and providing actionable insights for NGOs and government bodies on combatting disinformation.

Key words: conspiracy beliefs, unfounded beliefs, social factors, interventions, interpersonal relationships, intergroup dynamic