Across a pilot study and three preregistered experiments (N = 4128), we demonstrated that people knowingly shared conspiracy theories to advance social motives (e.g., to receive “likes”). In addition to accuracy, people seemed to value social engagement (e.g., “likes” and reactions). Importantly, people not only expected most conspiracy theories to generate greater social engagement than factual news, but they were also more willing to share conspiracy theories when they expected such theories, compared to factual news, to generate sufficiently greater levels of social engagement. In an interactive, multi-round, content-sharing paradigm, we found that people were very sensitive to the social feedback they received. When they received greater social feedback for sharing conspiracy theories than factual news, participants were significantly more likely to share conspiracy theories, even when they knew these theories to be false. Our findings advance our understanding of why and when individuals are likely to share conspiracy theories and identify important prescriptions for curbing the spread of conspiracy theories.

通过一项试点研究和三个预先注册的实验（N = 4128），我们证明人们故意分享阴谋论以促进社会动机（例如，接受“喜欢”）。除了准确性之外，人们似乎还重视社交参与（例如，“喜欢”和反应）。重要的是，人们不仅期望大多数阴谋论比事实新闻产生更大的社会参与度，而且当他们期望阴谋论与事实新闻相比能够产生足够高水平的社会参与度时，他们也更愿意分享阴谋论。在一个互动的、多轮的、内容共享的范式中，我们发现人们对他们收到的社会反馈非常敏感。当他们因分享阴谋论而获得比事实新闻更多的社会反馈时，参与者分享阴谋论的可能性显着增加，即使他们知道这些理论是错误的。我们的研究结果促进了我们对个人为什么以及何时可能分享阴谋论的理解，并确定了遏制阴谋论传播的重要处方。