Classical theories of attitude change point to the positive effect of source expertise on perceived source credibility persuasion, but there is an ongoing societal debate on the increase in anti-elitist sentiments and conspiracy theories regarding the allegedly untrustworthy power elite. In one correlational (N = 275) and three experimental studies (N = 195, N = 464, N = 225), we tested the novel idea that people who endorse a conspiratorial mind-set (conspiracy mentality) indeed exhibit markedly different reactions to cues of epistemic authoritativeness than those who do not: Whereas the perceived credibility of powerful sources decreased with the recipients’ conspiracy mentality, that of powerless sources increased independent of and incremental to other biases, such as the need to see the ingroup in particularly positive light. The discussion raises the question whether a certain extent of source-based bias is necessary for the social fabric of a highly complex society.
BilaliR.TroppL. R.DasguptaN. (2012). Attributions of responsibility and perceived harm in the aftermath of mass violence. Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, 18, 21-39.
2.
BilewiczM.WitkowskaM.StefaniakA.ImhoffR. (2017). The lay historian explains intergroup behavior: Examining the role of identification and cognitive structuring in ethnocentric historical attributions. Memory Studies, 10, 310-322.
3.
BlochM. (1921). Réflexions d’un historien sur les fausses nouvelles de la guerre [Reflections of a historian on the false news of war]. Revue de Synthèse Historique, 33, 13-35.
4.
BohnerG.RuderM.ErbH. P. (2002). When expertise backfires: Contrast and assimilation effects in persuasion. British Journal of Social Psychology, 41, 495-519.
5.
BruderM.HaffkeP.NeaveN.NouripanahN.ImhoffR. (2013). Measuring individual differences in generic beliefs in conspiracy theories across cultures: Conspiracy mentality questionnaire. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 225.
6.
ChaikenS. (1980). Heuristic versus systematic information processing and the use of source versus message cues in persuasion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39, 752-766.
7.
CichockaA.Golec de ZavalaA.MarchlewskaM.BilewiczM.JaworskaM.OlechowskiM. (2017). Personal control decreases narcissistic but increases non-narcissistic in-group positivity. Journal of Personality. Advance online publication. doi:10.1111/jopy.12328
8.
CookJ.LewandowskyS.EckerU. K. H. (2017). Neutralizing misinformation through inoculation: Exposing misleading argumentation techniques reduces their influence. PLoS ONE, 12, e017579.
9.
DackM. (2008). Crimes committed by Soviet soldiers against German civilians, 1944-1945: A historiographical analysis. Journal of Military and Strategic Studies, 10, 67-96.
10.
DoosjeB.BranscombeN. (2003). Attributions for the negative historical actions of a group. European Journal of Social Psychology, 33, 235-248.
11.
DurkheimE. (1897). Le suicide: étude de sociologie [Suicide: A sociological study]. Paris, France: F. Alcan.
12.
ErbH. P.BohnerG.SchmälzleK.RankS. (1998). Beyond conflict and discrepancy: Cognitive bias in minority and majority influence. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 24, 620-633.
13.
FrenchJ. R.RavenB. (1959). The bases of social power. In CartwrightD. (Ed.), Studies in social power (pp. 7-49). Arbor, MI: Institute for Social Research.
14.
GoertzelT. (1994). Belief in conspiracy theories. Political Psychology, 15, 731-742.
15.
HarringtonC. (2010). Politicization of sexual violence: From abolitionism to peacekeeping. London, England: Ashgate.
16.
HegartyP.KleinO. (2017). Historical cognition’s dilemmas: Introduction to the special issue—Recent advances in historical cognition. Memory Studies, 10, 243-248.
17.
HilbertM. (2012). How much information is there in the “information society?”Significance, 9, 8-12.
18.
HorneJ. N.KramerA. (2001). German atrocities, 1914: A history of denial. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
19.
HovlandC. I.JanisI. L.KelleyH. H. (1953). Communication and persuasion: Psychological studies of opinion change. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
20.
ImhoffR.BilewiczM.HankeK.KahnD. T.Henkel-GuembelN.HalabiS.. . . HirschbergerG. (2017). Explaining the inexplicable: Differences in attributions for the Holocaust in Germany, Israel and Poland. Political Psychology, 38, 907-924.
21.
ImhoffR.BruderM. (2014). Speaking (un-)truth to power: Conspiracy mentality as a generalised political attitude. European Journal of Personality, 28, 25-43.
22.
ImhoffR.ErbH. P. (2009). What motivates nonconformity? Uniqueness seeking blocks majority influence. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 35, 309-320.
23.
ImhoffR.KochA. (2017). How orthogonal are the Big Two of social perception? On the curvilinear relation between agency and communion. Perspectives in Psychological Science, 12, 122-137.
24.
ImhoffR.LambertyP. (2017). Too special to be duped: Need for uniqueness motivates conspiracy beliefs. European Journal of Social Psychology, 47, 724-734.
25.
ImhoffR.WohlM. J.ErbH. P. (2013). When the past is far from dead: How ongoing consequences of genocides committed by the ingroup impact collective guilt. Journal of Social Issues, 69, 74-91.
26.
KhanS. S.LiuJ. H. (2008). Intergroup attributions and ethnocentrism in the Indian Subcontinent: The ultimate attribution error revisited. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 39, 16-36.
27.
KleinO. (2013). The lay historian: How ordinary people think about history. In CabecinhasR.AbadiaL. (Eds.), Narratives and social memory: Theoretical and methodological approaches (pp. 25-45). Braga, Portugal: Centro de Estudos de Comunicação e Sociedade-Publicações.
28.
KossowskaM.Bar-TalY. (2013). Need for closure and heuristic information processing: The moderating role of the ability to achieve the need for closure. British Journal of Psychology, 104, 457-480.
29.
KruglanskiA. W.ThompsonE. P. (1999). Persuasion by a single route: A view from the unimodel. Psychological Inquiry, 10, 83-109.
30.
LantianA.MullerD.NurraC.DouglasK. M. (2017). “I know things they don’t know!”: The role of need for uniqueness in belief in conspiracy theories. Social Psychology, 48, 160-173.
31.
LewandowskyS.EckerU.CookJ. (2017). Beyond misinformation: Understanding and coping with the “post-truth” era. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 6, 353-369.
32.
LillyJ. R. (2007). Taken by force: Rape and American GIs in Europe in World War II. London, England: Palgrave MacMillan.
33.
LiuJ. H.Goldstein-HawesR.HiltonD.HuangL. L.Gastardo-ConacoC.Dresler-HawkeE.. . . KashimaY. (2005). Social representations of events and people in world history across 12 cultures. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 36, 171-191.
34.
LiuJ. H.HiltonD. J. (2005). How the past weighs on the present: Social representations of history and their role in identity politics. British Journal of Social Psychology, 44, 537-556.
35.
MarchlewskaM.CichockaA.KossowskaM. (2018). Addicted to answers: Need for cognitive closure and the endorsement of conspiracy beliefs. European Journal of Social Psychology, 48, 109-117.
36.
McCroskeyJ. C. (1966). Scales for the measurement of ethos. Speech Monographs, 33, 65-72.
37.
MoscoviciS. (1987). The conspiracy mentality. In GraumannC. F.MoscoviciS. (Eds.), Changing conceptions of conspiracy (pp. 151-169). New York, NY: Springer.
38.
NaimarkN. M. (1995). The Russians in Germany: A history of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949. Cambridge, UK: Belknap Press.
39.
NeslerM. S.AguinisH.QuigleyB. M.TedeschiJ. T. (1993). The effect of credibility on perceived power. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 23, 1407-1425.
40.
OeberstA.CressU.BackM.NestlerS. (2016). Individual versus collaborative information processing: The case of biases in Wikipedia. In CressU.MoskaliukJ.JeongH. (Eds.), Mass collaboration and education (pp. 165-185). Berlin, Germany: Springer.
41.
PennycookG.CheyneJ. A.BarrN.KoehlerD. J.FugelsangJ. A. (2015). On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit. Judgment and Decision Making, 10, 549-563.
42.
PettyR. E.CacioppoJ. T. (1984). The effects of involvement on responses to argument quantity and quality: Central and peripheral routes to persuasion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46, 69-81.
43.
PetzelT.WagnerU.NicolaiK.DickR.Van DickR. (1997). Ein kurzes Instrument zur Messung der Autoritarismus-Neigung [A short instrument for measuring authoritarian tendencies]. Gruppendynamik, 28, 251-258.
44.
PorterE.WoodT. J.KirbyD. (2018). Sex trafficking, Russian infiltration, birth certificates, and pedophilia: A survey experiment correcting fake news. Journal of Experimental Political Science. Advance online publication. doi:10.1017/XPS.2017.32
45.
PrattoF.SidaniusJ.StallworthL. M.MalleB. F. (1994). Social dominance orientation: A personality variable predicting social and political attitudes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 741-763.
46.
RicoeurP. (2004). Memory, history, forgetting. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
47.
RoccasS.KlarY.LiviatanI. (2006). The paradox of group-based guilt: Modes of national identification, conflict vehemence, and reactions to the in-group’s moral violations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91, 698-711.
48.
SchneiderW. E. (2001). Past imperfect: Irving v. Penguin Books Ltd., No. 1996-I-1113, 2000 WL 362478 (Q. B. Apr.11), appeal denied (Dec. 18, 2000). The Yale Law Journal, 110, 1531-1545.
49.
SchönbrodtF. D.PeruginiM. (2013). At what sample size do correlations stabilize?Journal of Research in Personality, 47, 609-612.
50.
SilversteinB.FlamenbaumC. (1989). Biases in the perception and cognition of the actions of enemies. Journal of Social Issues, 45, 51-72.
51.
SwamiV.ColesR.StiegerS.PietschnigJ.FurnhamA.RehimS.VoracekM. (2011). Conspiracist ideation in Britain and Austria: Evidence of a monological belief system and associations between individual psychological differences and real-world and fictitious conspiracy theories. British Journal of Psychology, 102, 443-463.
52.
TravisR. (1993). The MOS Alienation Scale: An alternative to Srole’s Anomia Scale. Social Indicators Research, 28, 71-91.
53.
van ProoijenJ.-W. (2017). Why education predicts decreased belief in conspiracy theories. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 31, 50-58.
54.
WoodM. J.DouglasK. M.SuttonR. M. (2012). Dead and alive. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 3, 767-773.
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
