Project information
Curbing conspicious mindset through social-psychological insights on intergroup attitudes (CONSPICIOUS)

From disinformation operations to populist rhetoric and foreign propaganda, the ongoing illiberal attacks on liberal democracies aim to spread and exploit a CONSPICIOUS (conspiracist + suspicious) mindset among the public. The rise of CONSPICIOUS mindset at the centre stage of policy concerns has led to two major streams of research. First, research on conspiracy beliefs (CBs) has highlighted psychological risk factors and documented the extent of CBs negative behavioural consequences - e.g., fuelling violent extremism, vaccine hesitancy, support for autocrats and illiberal political parties. Second, the growing awareness of societal harms stemming from CBs has also generated a prolific research program focused on misinformation and mostly online and cognitive interventions to curb its prevalence. Contrary to research efforts to date, the current CONSPICIOUS project stems from the understanding of CBs as intergroup attitudes and hypotheses that anti-CBs interventions that focus on improving intergroup attitudes may prove more effective than the former cognitive approach. The overarching aim of CONSPICIOUS is thus to shift scholarly focus towards dealing with CBs directly as intergroup attitudes through fulfilling three specific objectives: (i) identify interventions aimed at improving intergroup attitudes and adapt them to CBs, (ii) test the effectiveness of these interventions in a large scale intervention tournament, (iii) explore generalizability of the most effective interventions in a longitudinal trial. CONSPICIOUS will rely on a large randomised controlled trial (megastudy, N≈10,000) and a two-wave longitudinal study (N≈1500, first wave). By changing the research perspective, the current project offers an utterly new paradigm of scholarly approaches to curbing the CONSPICIOUS mindset.