Beyond belief: How social engagement motives influence the spread of conspiracy theories

Across a pilot study and three preregistered experiments (N = 4128), we demonstrated that people knowingly shared conspiracy theories to advance social motives (e.g., to receive “likes”). In addition to accuracy, people seemed to value social engagement (e.g., “likes” and reactions). Importantly, people not only expected most conspiracy theories to generate greater social engagement than factual news, but they were also more willing to share conspiracy theories when they expected such theories, compared to factual news, to generate sufficiently greater levels of social engagement. In an interactive, multi-round, content-sharing paradigm, we found that people were very sensitive to the social feedback they received. When they received greater social feedback for sharing conspiracy theories than factual news, participants were significantly more likely to share conspiracy theories, even when they knew these theories to be false. Our findings advance our understanding of why and when individuals are likely to share conspiracy theories and identify important prescriptions for curbing the spread of conspiracy theories.