I just defended my thesis. There was a rain storm that day.

Author: Mallory McDonald | Majors: Psychology and Biology

Most of us have that family member at Thanksgiving going on and on about the most recent conspiracy theory that their totally reliable news source just told them. Here are the three best signs that a person is a conspiracy theorist and how to combat their false narratives.

Sign 1: They have belief in the unknown (including religion).

Sign 2: Their age matters. The older the people are the more likely they will believe in conspiracy theories.

Sign 3: They are not a part of the University of Arkansas Honors College. (While this has not been tested quantitatively, in my personal experience, it tends to hold true.)

The demographics of my participants were educated and young, not the ideal candidates for testing conspiracy theories intervention techniques. For these reasons and others, my results were inconclusive. A struggle that most scientists experience multiple times throughout their careers. Oh man, this was upsetting and made for a very humbling research project.

However, the largest struggles came when I began writing my thesis. Sure, I could write ten pages about a topic before this experience. It was not my best writing ever. It was passable in classes. Through writing a thesis, my mentor really worked with me on how to organize my thoughts concisely. During the drafting phase, Dr. Scott Eidelman would send me revisions that asked me to change paragraph 15 to paragraph 4. He taught me the effectiveness of using headers (a skill that I still use in all of my classes) to organize my writing. I finished my thesis as a better writer than when I began.

“I wish I knew what I know now when I started writing my thesis.,” I remember telling my thesis committee during my defense. Organizing my thoughts is just one of the many lessons I learned. When I wrote my original research grant application, I stumbled my way through gathering and writing the background information that I needed. I am still not sure if it is correct. It is not what I had in my final document. While the demographics of my participants were a major factor, another reason that my results came back inconclusive was that I am unsure if my participants were aware of the conspiracy theory we were trying to get them to believe. In the beginning, I could have done more research on the front end about how to better introduce the made-up conspiracy theory to my participants.

Because my only goal (I write sarcastically) of my research was to be able to finish this Buzzfeed-like article. So that I could say, when you encounter the people that share these three characteristics, these are the steps you can take to counter their belief system.

My research question was examining different intervention techniques that could be used on a person depending on how personally relevant the conspiracy theory was to them. Hypothetically, here are the steps to counter conspiracy theories:

Step 1: Determine if the conspiracy theory is highly relevant to the person or not.

Step 2: If highly relevant, use emotions and personal stories to talk to the person about why the conspiracy theory might be wrong. If personal relevance is low, use facts and statistics to talk to the person.

However, this is all theory.

This research, through multiple long and hard conversations, fell into my lap. However, I could not be more excited about the experience and the topic. To leave you with one last piece of advice when writing an honors thesis, be open to new ideas and topics that you might not have considered before.