Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Causal explanations are important guides to understanding the world. While research suggests people prefer simple explanations, a seeming notable exception exists in the widespread endorsement of conspiracy theories. Researchers have described conspiracy theories as causally complex explanations of world events. We examined whether the lay public agrees with this assessment and sees conspiracy theories as complex explanations, as well as how perceptions of complexity relate to believability of these explanations. We tested publicly available (Experiment 1) and experimenter-generated (Experiment 2) conspiracy theories, alongside fact-based explanations for the same events. We asked participants to rate the complexity of each explanation, along with how believable they find the explanation. Participants across studies rated the conspiracy theory explanations as more complex. Interestingly, complexity was positively correlated with believability of the conspiracy theory, but not fact-based, explanations. We discuss what these findings suggest for the causal explanation field and our understanding of conspiracy theories.