Just the Facts: How Dialogues with AI Reduce Conspiracy Beliefs

Thomas H. Costello, Gordon Pennycook, David G. Rand

Personalized dialogues with AI substantially reduce conspiracy beliefs. To identify why, we conducted two experiments with U.S. adults recruited online (total N = 2,193) that removed possible causes one at a time. The debunking effect was robust to disclosing the AI's persuasive goal, framing the exchange as a debate, instructing the AI to inform rather than persuade, halving its response length, altering how beliefs were measured, and replacing the dialogue with a single tailored message. Only instructing the AI to persuade without factual evidence and arguments substantially reduced the debunking effect. Content analyses of the AI's output and participants' own accounts linked larger reductions in conspiracy beliefs to factual argumentation rather than rapport, storytelling, or appeals to empathy. AI dialogues appear to reduce conspiracy beliefs primarily by supplying relevant, well-reasoned counterevidence. Our results suggest that humans might be similarly effective if they could supply comparable evidence.