Our research focuses on how radical ideologies interact with information over politically charged facts and, consequently, motivate the acceptance of anti-scientific conceptions that are consistent with people’s values and beliefs.

In recent times, interconnected forms of anti-scientific conceptions flourish throughout the political spectrum, such as conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, fact resistance, and “alternative facts”, which have gained social relevance, negatively affecting decision-making over key social issues—e.g., several forms of science-related populism, climate change denial, the anti-vaccination movement, unsubstantiated claims within alternative medicine, and conspiracy theories around COVID-19 and 5G. In this regard, post-truth has emerged as a higher-order concept that describes the current sociological state of affairs in which these anti-scientific beliefs shape politics and the media. The post-truth situation is not merely a misinformation issue that can be corrected by proper information and training, instead, it is the result of the competition between highly influential alternative epistemologies, which thrive within corrupted information architectures and socio-political landscapes.

We investigate how ingroup ideological extremism motivates individuals to perform partisan assessment of scientific information, being particularly interested in the commonalities and asymmetries between far-right and far-left ideologies. Previous results suggest that the heightened perception of threat and grievance that lies at the root of radical ideologies boost polarization over specific information, facilitating a feedback loop of conspiracy ideation that reinforces misguided beliefs. These extremist worldviews, which are characterized as simplistic, overconfident, and black-and-white perceptions of the social world, include authoritarian agendas (both right-wing and left-wing), current forms of nationalism in the European context, identity politics, and radical interpretations of economic policies.