Curing the Red Pill’s Side Effects: Theoretical Preconceptions on Interviewing Ex-Conspiracy Believers

Conspiracism is one of the most prominent perpetrators of affective polarization today (Kumkar 2024; Nefes & Romero-Reche 2024; Willemsen 2025). In the second phase of our EU-funded research project Tackling Conspiracy Theories by Fostering Resilience and Political Self- Efficacy in Democracies (TaCT-FoRSED), we will be interviewing ex-conspiracy believers on their former conspiratorial beliefs and on the ways, they managed to get away from conspiracism and the conspiracist community. This approach will most likely provide new insights as we will be interviewing persons in as many as eight European countries. From anecdotal interviews with ex-conspiracy believers, we know that spontaneous revelations as well as a sudden realization of the mechanisms behind one’s own conspiracism often play a role for conspiracy believers to switch sides. Also, stable interpersonal ties—be it family, friends, co-workers—are often emphasized to be helpful. However, there is lack of substantial qualitative research on those persons who formerly did believe in conspiracist ideologies but have deliberately given up those views. Some first approaches (Matthias et. al. 2025) underline the importance on the one hand of personal relations, but also of a healthy relationship to doubt and on other people’s perspectives. Those first findings align well with our preconceptions (Christoph et. al. 2025) that not only epistemic resources, but also the training of democratic identity (as accepting others’ norms and values) and democratic resilience (in a sense: being normative but not rigid) play an important role in not only preventing conspiracism but also in intervening to it. Not least, from a theoretical point of view we suggest that the experience of democratic efficacy (Christoph et. al. 2025; cf. Bandura 2006) might additionally also play a major role in tackling conspiracism. Therefore, a central part of the interviews will focus on tolerance of ambiguity and accepting others, on a sense of (democratic) belonging, on democratic self-efficacy, and on perceived (political) deprivation of the participants. This paper I will present our main theoretical assumptions underlying the conception of interview guides at that stage of research as well as our methodological conceptions. Subsequently, qualitative comparison may be carried out among the different interviewees, taking into consideration their sociodemographic and biographical information as well as their statements about the conspiracy theories they believed in, and—most interestingly—how they managed to drop out of conspiracism and therefore likely managed to also escape the hamster wheel of polarization.