Scientists have discovered which people consider themselves smarter than everyone else

People who believe in conspiracy theories are not just confident in their correctness - they also greatly overestimate their mental abilities and think that most people around them agree with them. This conclusion was reached by an international group of scientists. The work was published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (PSPB).

The study covered data from more than four thousand people from the USA. All participants performed tasks on logical thinking, perception, and risk assessment, and then reported how well they thought they did. Scientists compared these self-assessments with actual results and found that people prone to overconfidence in their abilities are more likely to believe in false conspiracy theories - for example, that the Moon landing was a hoax, and vaccines are part of government control.

"We knew that conspiracy theorists are often very confident in their correctness," explained study author Gordon Pennycook, a professor at Cornell University. "But now it has become clear that they generally exhibit excessive confidence in their intellectual abilities."

Particularly interesting was an experiment with almost indistinguishable images, where participants' answers depended more on guessing than on actual skill. Even in this case, people who thought they did well were more likely to be supporters of conspiratorial views. This showed that inflated self-esteem is a stable personality trait, not a random phenomenon.

In addition, conspiracy theorists greatly overestimate how many people support them. Although on average only 12% of respondents shared a particular theory, those who believed in it thought they were in the majority - 93% of cases.

Although it was previously thought that belief in conspiracies is due to a desire to feel special or explain events in a convenient worldview, the new research shows that a much bigger role is played by simple distortion of perception - overestimation of one's own mental abilities and confidence that "everyone thinks this way."