Conspiracy belief was the field's paradigm case of evidence-immunity, with little evidence any intervention could debunk committed believers

Before 2024, conspiracy belief functioned as social psychology's textbook example of a belief immune to correction. The governing theory held that the belief serves psychological needs — control, community, uniqueness — rather than tracking facts, so counterevidence bounces off. Costello, Pennycook & Rand summarise the received view: conspiracy belief "is often used as a paradigmatic example of resistance to evidence... there is little evidence of interventions that successfully debunk conspiracies among people who already believe them."

This premise had a concrete downstream consequence: it is the reason the field pivoted from debunking (arguing believers out after the fact) to prebunking / inoculation theory (pre-arming people before exposure). If committed believers cannot be reached, the only leverage is prevention — a weakened dose of the manipulation technique administered in advance to build resistance. The "evidence-immunity" consensus is thus the load-bearing assumption underneath a whole defensive research program, which makes it the claim most consequential to overturn.

The assertion is the setup that claim-tailored-ai-dialogue-durably-reduced-conspiracy-belief reverses: the same authors show a tailored AI dialogue does move entrenched believers, and reinterpret the prior failures as a failure of tailoring, not of the believers' reachability. It sits in the vault's epistemic-defense cluster alongside structured methods for resisting one's own priors (claim-ach-step-5-instructs-analysts-to-disprove-not-prove, claim-heuer-grounds-ach-in-cognitive-psychology-decision-analysis-scientific-method) and cases where a refutation failed to dislodge a belief in practice (claim-yellow-rain-bee-feces-refutation-never-formally-retracted).