Science Just Proved That Conspiracy Theorists Will Literally Believe ANYTHING

Science Just Proved That Conspiracy Theorists Will Literally Believe ANYTHING

If there's one continuous law in the universe it's that there will always be people who thought Elvis was an alien and that the Moon landings were fake.

Well don't just take our word for it, because science has rather handily come up with a way of actually proving it.

Alessandro Bessi and his team of researchers at the IUSS Institute for Advanced Study found that once a person starts believing one conspiracy theory they'll almost certainly believe all of them.

The team looked at 1000s of users who commented on science news pages or conspiracy theory pages within Facebook. What they then found was that the users who looked at conspiracy theory pages almost exclusively spent their time browsing similar pages.

Conversely they found that users who looked at scientific pages would explore more, looking at a wide range of other pages on different subjects.

Not content with this the researchers then posted 5,000 troll comments on both types of pages to see the results. These included:

'Did you know 'chem trails' trails from planes have been chemically analysed and found to contain viagra.'

Now this is going to come as a shock, but the conspiracy theorists believed every word, no matter how ridiculous the comments got. It apparently reached the point where the comments had descended into full satire and they were still believe them.

While the paper was actually published in February 2015, the results have been thrown into the public sphere courtesy of a YouTube video by Rebecca Watson who published her explanation: "No Shit Study: Scientists Show Conspiracy Theorists Will Believe Anything"

Correction:This article has been updated to reflect that the lead researcher was Alessandro Bessi from IUSS Institute for Advanced Study.

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