Priming Need–Frustrating Memories Sparks Conspiracy Beliefs: A Self‐Determination Theory Perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Memories shape perceptions and decisions in uncertain situations through their encoded levels of autonomy, competence, and relatedness satisfaction or frustration. This research investigated their predictive value on COVID-19 conspiracy theories endorsement, when triggered by freedom-restrictive contexts. METHOD: Study 1 (N = 141) randomly exposed participants to a control, moderate, or high freedom-restrictive vignette before describing a memory. Participants reported their endorsement of COVID-19 conspiracy theories a week later. Study 2 (N = 213) asked participants to describe a memory after reading a freedom-restrictive vignette. A week later, a yoked control design randomly assigned participants to either be primed with their own memory or with someone else's memory before reacting to a bogus conspiracy theory. RESULTS: Study 1 revealed a predictive association specifically between autonomy-frustrating memories triggered by freedom-restrictive vignettes and COVID-19 conspiracy theories endorsement. Study 2 showed that priming autonomy-frustrating memories situationally increased the likelihood of endorsing a bogus conspiracy theory, becoming angered by it, and expressing willingness to disseminate it, compared to a non-primed group and a group primed with autonomy-satisfying memories. CONCLUSIONS: This research highlights the role of autonomy-frustrating memories in endorsing conspiracy theories, suggesting that such endorsement can emerge from the interplay between the individual (memories) and the environment (triggering cues).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".