Anthony Lantian & Michael Rose
No Evidence that Belief in Conspiracy Theories is Negatively Related to Attitudes Toward Transhumanism
Transhumanism (or post-humanism) is a cultural and intellectual movement that emphasizes the possibility and desirability of improvements of the human condition by developing and making widely available technologies aiming to eliminate aging and enhancing human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities. The allegedly transhumanist agenda of the elites are regularly pointed out by people who believe in conspiracy theories (e.g., transhumanists suspected of poisoning people or using the COVID-19 pandemic to usher in a post-human era, Infowars, 2017, 2020). We posit the following hypothesis: the more people believe in conspiracy theories, the less favorable will become their attitudes toward the transhumanist movement. We tested this link in two pre-registered studies (based on two French samples, total N after exclusion = 550). We found no evidence of a negative link between belief in conspiracy theories and attitudes toward transhumanism (in Study 1, r(243) = .06, 95% CI[-.06, .19], p = .322; in Study 2, r(298) = -.06, 95% CI[-.17, .05], p = .287). These null results were supported by Bayesian analyses (in Study 1: BF01 = 4.59, in Study 2: BF01 = 18.03), equivalence test, and an internal mini meta-analysis (r = -.002, 95% CI [-.12, .12], z = -0.03, p = .972, test of heterogeneity: Q(1) = 2.10, p = .148, I² = 52.3%). In conclusion, our work paves the way to a better understanding of the attitudes toward an international cultural and intellectual movement that, in the future, will undoubtedly grow in popularity and influence.
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