The Impact of Conspiracy Beliefs and Cognitive Style on Online Health Information Seeking
We investigated how conspiracy beliefs and cognitive reasoning affect online health information search strategies. In an experiment, 82 participants performed a COVID-19 fact-finding task. Analytic thinking predicted a preference for official sources, whereas conspiracy beliefs predicted distrust in them. However, a debiasing intervention showed no significant impact on search strategies but a conceptual replication of Swami’s et al. 2014 did.
Authors
- Bastien Trémolière (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7626-2902)
- Cheyenne Dosso (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4386-5325)
- Aline Chevalier (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2490-1212)
- Nathan Vital
Institutions
- Université Fédérale de Toulouse Midi-Pyrénées (FR)
- Laboratoire Cognition, Langues, Langage, Ergonomie (FR)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
- Published
- 2026-04-27
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19818638
- Primary Topic
- Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00