# Think About It! Deliberation Reduces the Negative Relation Between Conspiracy Belief and Adherence to Prosocial Norms - Author(s): Lotte Pummerer, Lara Ditrich, Kevin Winter, and Kai Sassenberg - Date: 2022 - Publication: Social Psychological and Personality Science - [Link](https://doi.org/10.1177/19485506221144150) --- ## Summary This paper investigates whether we can mitigate the ***correlates* of conspiracy belief *rather than the conspiracy belief itself*** with a cognitive manipulation. They tested: 1. whether believing in conspiracy theories is related to lower prosocial norm adherence and 2. whether deliberation about the reason for the norms mitigates this relationship They found that: 1. believing in conspiracy theories correlated negatively with prosocial norm adherence, which was 2. less pronounced after deliberation (effect size of interaction: d = 0.16) **Asking participants to *name the reasons* for the norms (aka deliberation about those norms) was enough to mitigate the negative relation between conspiracy belief and norm adherence.** --- #### Related [[psychology]] [[conspiracy]] [[misinformation]] [[misinfo_interventions]] - [[Paper_Pennycook_2021_PsychologyOfFakeNews]] - [[Paper_Pennycook_2021_ShiftingAttentionToAccuracy]] - [[Paper_Bago_2020_FakeNewsFastAndSlow]]