Lisbon, July 4, 2025 (Lusa) - People who are more religious and have right-wing political ideologies are more likely to accept alternative treatments, as well as more likely to accept conspiracy theories and misinformation about health, concluded a study by researcher Catarina Santos.
In an interview with the Lusa news agency, the ISCTE researcher and author of the study "The role of conspiracist and pseudoscientific beliefs in predicting adherence to alternative treatments", said that "people who are more religious and right-wing are more likely to accept alternative treatments (...) so there are personality traits that can lead people to be more likely to accept conspiracy theories".
Catarina Santos begins by explaining that pseudoscience is everything that "under the guise of the credibility of science, sells things that have no scientific proof, be they treatments or pseudo medicines, which end up wanting to take the place of established scientific procedures".
In this sense, "pseudoscience, a specific type of disinformation, covers a whole range of health areas, and has the hallmark of keeping people away from treatments that are effective for the issues that plague them".
"Health disinformation is anything that makes people think they know something about a particular subject, based on facts that don't exist or beliefs that aren't realistic and [aren't] true," she said.
Furthermore, the researcher explained that "the information that is transmitted may be true, however, how the individual interprets this information can lead them to be uninformed", pointing to a lack of critical thinking and literacy on the subject as a possible justification.
"There are individual and personal characteristics that can lead to a greater tendency to believe in disinformation. People with less literacy in a given area have a greater tendency to believe disinformation," she added.
When it comes to accepting disinformation in the context of medical consultations, "people tend to favour conventional treatments over alternative ones". In contrast, "a person who believes in a conspiracy theory tends to believe in other similar things", she said.
"People who think they know more about things are the ones who intuitively adhere the most [to these theories] because they don't use their critical thinking skills (...) it's the confidence they have in their knowledge that leads them to accept things they don't properly understand," the researcher explained.
Furthermore, "if a doctor gives the information and there is trust in science, it is normal to accept conventional treatment better", and the study carried out by the academic concluded that "conspiratorial beliefs and a lack of trust in science significantly influence treatment decisions. Addressing these beliefs is crucial to combating misinformation about health and encouraging adherence to evidence-based medical care," she said.
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Lusa
