News Literacy Practice Activity

The following practice activity was created based on one of the online quizzes from the News Literacy Project. Before you complete the activity, review the additional material on this page.

Avoid the Trap of Conspiratorial Thinking

Conspiracy theories appeal to our psychological need for a simple explanation and someone to blame. You can stumble across them online even when searching for reliable information. These compelling narratives, and the false evidence they include, can draw you in, manipulating your emotions and using your cognitive biases against you to trick you into believing them. This quiz is designed to help you learn to recognize conspiratorial thinking and understand its consequences.

Notes

Actual conspiracies have occurred throughout history, but they differ from conspiracy theories in important ways.
People are drawn to conspiracy theories because they satisfy psychological needs and help people deal with complex emotions about difficult events.
Conspiratorial thinking includes three key elements that work together to strengthen conspiratorial beliefs.
- The first key element is motivated reasoning, which is reasoning that seeks to confirm what a person already wants to believe or thinks is true.
- The second element is institutional cynicism — the belief that institutions like government and corporations have a secret, self-serving motive and cannot be trusted.
- The third is illusory pattern perception (or patternicity) — the thinking that meaningful patterns exist in random details, facts or events.
Cognitive biases are common, specific errors in the ways we take in and frame information. These three cognitive biases often make conspiratorial thinking seem more legitimate than it actually is:
- Proportionality bias is the belief that major events must have major causes.
- Intentionality bias occurs when instead of accepting the randomness of certain events, people sometimes seek information that helps them portray the event in question as intentional.
- Confirmation bias is the natural tendency of people to readily accept claims that agree with or reinforce their existing beliefs, and to find reasons to dismiss claims and evidence that contradict or complicate their beliefs in some way.

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