Editorial Expression of Concern on 2024 Research Article “Durably reducing conspiracy beliefs through dialogues with AI”

On 13 September 2024, Science published the Research Article “Durably reducing conspiracy beliefs through dialogues with AI” by Thomas H. Costello, Gordon Pennycook, and David G. Rand. The authors were later made aware of reporting inconsistencies and issues with the public dataset that made it challenging to reproduce some of the specific values reported in the manuscript. After investigating, the authors informed Science that there are inconsistencies in the application of screening criteria between the manuscript and published analysis pipeline, and that the published dataset includes extraneous spliced rows caused by a code-merging error. The authors have provided Science with a corrected analysis pipeline from the raw datasets and a corresponding set of updated results, which Science is now evaluating. The authors report that the corrected pipeline produces results that match those in the original article in direction, statistical significance, and substantive size. Science is alerting readers to these issues while this evaluation is underway.