Know someone convinced that the moon landing was faked or the COVID-19 pandemic was a hoax? Debating with a sympathetic chatbot may help pluck people who believe in those and other conspiracy theories out of the rabbit hole, researchers report in the Sept. 13 Science.
Across multiple experiments with more than 2,000 people, the team found that talking with a chatbot weakened people’s beliefs in a given conspiracy theory by, on average, 20 percent. Those conversations even curbed the strength of conviction, though to a lesser degree, for people who said the conspiratorial belief was central to their worldview. And the changes persisted for two months after the experiment.
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