Conspiracy believers often claim to be critical thinkers their ‘own research’ instead of relying on others' testimony. In two preregistered behavioural studies conducted in the United Kingdom and Pakistan (N_participants = 864, N_trials = 5408), we test whether conspiracy believers have a general tendency to discount social information (in favour of their own opinions and intuitions). We found that conspiracy mentality is not associated with social information use in text-based (Study 1) and image-based (Study 2) advice-taking tasks. Yet, we found discrepancies between self-reported and actual social information use. Conspiracy believers were more likely to report relying less on social information than actually relying less on social information in the behavioural tasks. Our results suggest that the scepticism of conspiracy believers towards epistemic authorities is unlikely to be the manifestation of a general tendency to discount social information. Conspiracy believers may be more permeable to social influence than they sometimes claim.

中文翻译：

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阴谋论信徒声称自己是自由思想家，但（低于）像其他人一样使用建议

阴谋论信徒经常声称自己是批判性思想家，他们的“自己的研究”而不是依赖他人的证词。在英国和巴基斯坦进行的两项预先注册的行为研究中（N 名_参与者 = 864 名，N 名_试验 = 5408 名），我们测试了阴谋论信徒是否普遍倾向于忽视社会信息（偏向于他们自己的观点和直觉）。我们发现阴谋心态与基于文本（研究 1）和基于图像（研究 2）的建议获取任务中的社交信息使用无关。然而，我们发现自我报告和实际社交信息使用之间存在差异。阴谋论相信者更有可能报告在行为任务中较少依赖社会信息，而不是实际上较少依赖社会信息。我们的研究结果表明，阴谋论信徒对认知权威的怀疑不太可能是忽视社会信息的普遍趋势的表现。阴谋论者可能比他们有时声称的更容易受到社会影响。