What are the underlying cognitive mechanisms that support belief in conspiracies? Common dual-process perspectives suggest that deliberation helps people make more accurate decisions and decreases belief in conspiracy theories that have been proven wrong (therefore, bringing people closer to objective accuracy). However, evidence for this stance is i) mostly correlational and ii) existing causal evidence might be influenced by experimental demand effects and/or a lack of suitable control conditions. Furthermore, recent work has found that analytic thinking tends to increase the coherence between prior beliefs and new information, which may not always lead to accurate conclusions. In two studies (Study 1: N = 1028; Study 2: N = 1000), participants were asked to evaluate the strength of conspiracist (or non-conspiracist) explanations of events. In the first study, which used well-known conspiracy theories, deliberation had no effect. In the second study, which used relatively unknown conspiracy theories, we found that experimentally manipulating deliberation did increase belief accuracy - but only among people with a strong ‘anti-conspiracy’ or strong ‘pro-conspiracy’ mindset from the beginning, and not among those with an intermediate conspiracist mindset. Although these results generally support the idea that encouraging people to deliberate can help to counter the growth of novel conspiracy theories, they also indicate that the effect of deliberation on conspiracist beliefs is more complicated than previously thought.

支持阴谋论的潜在认知机制是什么？常见的双重过程观点表明，深思熟虑有助于人们做出更准确的决定，并减少对已被证明错误的阴谋论的信念（因此，使人们更接近客观准确性）。然而，这种立场的证据是 i) 主要是相关的，ii) 现有的因果证据可能受到实验需求效应和/或缺乏合适的控制条件的影响。此外，最近的工作发现，分析性思维往往会增加先前信念和新信息之间的连贯性，这可能并不总是能得出准确的结论。在两项研究中（研究 1：N  = 1028；研究 2：N = 1000），参与者被要求评估对事件的阴谋论（或非阴谋论）解释的强度。在使用众所周知的阴谋论的第一项研究中，深思熟虑没有效果。在第二项研究中，使用了相对不为人知的阴谋论，我们发现通过实验操纵审议确实提高了信念的准确性——但仅限于从一开始就具有强烈“反阴谋”或强烈“赞成阴谋”心态的人，而不是在那些具有中等阴谋论者心态的人。尽管这些结果普遍支持鼓励人们深思熟虑有助于遏制新阴谋论的发展的观点，但它们也表明，深思熟虑对阴谋论的影响比以前想象的要复杂得多。