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.
Vital et al. (Mon,) studied this question.