Is Pseudoscience Mimicry?

Pseudosciences often bear a striking resemblance to the sciences. This paper in- vestigates how the appearance of social media posts influences people’s perception of their digital content as scientific. We present the results of two empirical studies. The first, preparatory study identifies typical characteristics of “scientificness” in social media posts to inform feature manipulations for the main study. The main study then examines what happens if the features are systematically manipulated. The findings support the hypothesis that pseudoscientific digital content benefits from using features of scientificness. We propose to frame our results using the bi- ological analogy of mimicry and discuss implications for understanding the appeal and persistence of pseudoscience.