Revealing Attentional Biases in Conspiracy Theory Believers

Valuable insights have been gained from studies on the subjective experience of belief in conspiracy theories. However, the focus on explicit processes might overlook relevant underlying cognitive processes. In this paper we take a different approach and explore the existence of an attentional bias among conspiracy theory believers. As an implicit measure of this attentional bias, we employ a colour-naming task containing topic- and conspiracy-related words. We hypothesized that 1) believers exhibit an attentional bias towards conspiracy-related words, 2) this bias is larger compared to non-believers, and 3) it is associated with self-reported conspiracy beliefs. In two experiments (total n = 418) conspiracy believers and non-believers completed the colour-naming task and we found support for believers’ conspiracy-related attentional bias. These findings contribute to understanding the self-sustaining nature of conspiracy beliefs, suggesting that believers may perceive or attend to information differently than non-believers. The results also indicate the promise of an implicit measure of conspiracy theory belief.