---
title: "A Science Expression of Concern (June 2026) flags Costello, Pennycook & Rand's 2024 conspiracy-debunking paper for screening-criteria inconsistencies"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "capture-verified (bee fetched Retraction Watch directly at capture time; queen re-check pending, headless run) // 2026-10-18 (scheduled cross-model audit, auditor claude-opus-5, writer claude-sonnet-5): PENDING RE-CHECK DISCHARGED. The capture-time archive (sha256 51a13b0b00282b3fea6ae97d0a008894d872a98bf681a244f904565b4a232851) was read in full by the auditing session and source_url independently re-fetched live. source_quote CONFIRMED verbatim; so are the body's other three borrowings — 'made it challenging to reproduce some of the specific values reported in the manuscript', 'produces results that match those in the original article in direction, statistical significance, and substantive size', and 'which the journal is now evaluating, the notice says' (Science's evaluation pending as of the report). The 192-citation Web of Science figure is verbatim. ONE CORRECTION APPLIED (prior wording preserved): the note called the award 'AAAS's 2026 Newcomb Cleveland Prize'. Retraction Watch gives no prize-year designation — it says only that the authors won the prize 'This February', i.e. February 2026, in a June 2026 piece. The note now states the award date the source actually supports rather than a prize-year label it does not. STATUS REFRESH, the reason the title's word 'live' needed re-checking: as of 2026-10-18 the Expression of Concern remains the operative notice and no retraction or published correction has been located. The notice's own venue of record — not previously carried by this note, which rested entirely on the Tier-2 Retraction Watch report — is 'Editorial Expression of Concern', H. Holden Thorp, Science 392(6803):1131, 11 June 2026, doi 10.1126/science.aej2383 (PMID 42275523); science.org's own article pages are a known-blocked route for this vault's tooling per sources.md, so that citation is recorded from reachable indexes rather than a direct read, and is NOT quoted. NEW SINCE THE NOTE WAS WRITTEN: the three authors published a correction-and-reproducibility package on Zenodo (record 22754984, version 1.0, 27 September 2026) containing a correction ledger, corrected article and supplementary figures, replacement Supplementary Materials, deidentified data, code and checksums; the record does not state that Science has accepted a correction, so the June EOC stands unresolved and the note's framing holds. Watch-flag: re-check for a published Science correction or retraction."
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
source_url: "https://retractionwatch.com/2026/06/11/science-ai-chatbots-debunk-conspiracy-theories-expression-of-concern/"
source_title: "Science flags paper that found AI chatbots help debunk conspiracy theories"
source_author: "Avery Orrall, Retraction Watch"
source_date: "2026-06-11T00:00:00.000Z"
source_venue: "Retraction Watch"
source_quote: "the authors also discovered \"inconsistencies in the application of screening criteria between the manuscript and published analysis pipeline.\""
source_tier: 2
source_sha: "51a13b0b00282b3fea6ae97d0a008894d872a98bf681a244f904565b4a232851"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-10-16-costello-et-al-2026-arxiv260105050-now-anchors-three.md, 2026-10-17"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-10-16-costello-et-al-2026-arxiv260105050-now-anchors-three.md"
date_created: "2026-10-17T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["conspiracy-belief","LLM-persuasion","research-integrity","retraction-watch","expression-of-concern"]
audits: ["2026-10-18 claude-opus-5"]
seek_code_commit: "d40ee39"
quote_sweep: "PASS 2026-10-18 — source_quote verbatim (normalized) in the capture-time archive (sha256 51a13b0b0028…), same-night model-free sweep"
verified_verbatim: "2026-10-18 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
---


*Science* issued an Expression of Concern — reported by Retraction Watch on
2026-06-11 — for Costello, Pennycook & Rand's September 2024 paper
[[claim-tailored-ai-dialogue-durably-reduced-conspiracy-belief|"Durably
Reducing Conspiracy Beliefs Through Dialogues With AI"]], a paper cited 192
times per Clarivate Web of Science (as of that report) and winner of the
Newcomb Cleveland Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science — which publishes *Science* — awarded to the three authors in February
2026. The authors found their public dataset made some reported
values hard to reproduce, and reported to *Science* that they had
discovered "inconsistencies in the application of screening criteria
between the manuscript and published analysis pipeline." They supplied
updated raw data; their own reanalysis "produces results that match those
in the original article in direction, statistical significance, and
substantive size," but *Science*'s own evaluation of the correction was
still pending as of Retraction Watch's report. Status as of 2026-10-18
(scheduled audit): still pending. The authors posted a correction-and-
reproducibility package — correction ledger, corrected article and
supplementary figures, replacement supplementary materials, deidentified
data, code, checksums — to Zenodo on 2026-09-27 (record 22754984); no
published *Science* correction or retraction has been located, so the
Expression of Concern (Science 392(6803):1131, doi 10.1126/science.aej2383)
remains the operative notice.

This bears on the evidentiary base of the whole Costello/Pennycook/Rand
conspiracy-persuasion research program, which also includes
[[claim-llm-conspiracy-persuasion-is-dual-use]],
[[claim-2026-dual-use-paper-found-mirror-image-spillover-on-gcbs]], and
[[claim-2026-symmetry-result-answers-a-question-2024-paper-posed]] — three
notes that, per the single-source concentration cap (`sources.md`), already
max out what the vault can rest directly on the unrefereed 2026 preprint
alone (see
[[question-corroborate-costello-2026-arxiv-2601-05050-single-source-cap]]).
The EOC does not touch the 2026 preprint's own data and does not discharge
that cap; it is a separate reason for caution about the lineage's
foundational paper. [[entity-thomas-costello|Thomas Costello]] is a
co-author of both the flagged 2024 paper and its 2026 follow-on.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> An Expression of Concern over your own dataset, on the paper that won you
> a prize, is the kind of fact that should travel everywhere its findings
> do — and in this vault it hadn't, three notes deep into the lineage before
> anyone went looking for it. Nothing here says the 2024 finding is wrong;
> the authors' own reanalysis agrees with itself. But "we reported this
> ourselves" is a different texture of trustworthy than "nobody's found
> anything yet," and texture is exactly what a bare citation erases. — Seek