The role of epistemic trust and epistemic disruption in vaccine hesitancy, conspiracy thinking and the capacity to identify fake news

Epistemic trust - defined as readiness to regard knowledge, communicated by another agent, as significant, relevant to the self, and generalizable to other contexts–has recently been applied to the field of developmental psychopathology as a potential risk factor for psychopathology. The work described here sought to investigate how the vulnerability engendered by disruptions in epistemic trust may not only impact psychological resilience and interpersonal processes but also aspects of more general social functioning. We undertook two studies to examine the role of epistemic trust in determining capacity to recognise fake/ real news, and susceptibility to conspiracy thinking–both in general and in relation to COVID-19. Measuring three different epistemic dispositions–trusting, mistrusting and credulous–in two studies (study 1, n = 705; study 2 n = 502), we found that Credulity was associated with inability to discriminate between fake/real news. We also found that both Mistrust and Credulity mediated the relationship between exposure to childhood adversity and difficulty in distinguishing between fake/real news, although the effect sizes were small. Finally, Mistrust and Credulity were associated with general and COVID-19 related conspiracy beliefs and vaccine hesitancy. We discuss the implications of these findings for our understanding of fake news and conspiracy thinking.