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Do I think BLS data are BS? The consequences of conspiracy theories
Abstract
While the willingness of people to believe unfounded and conspiratorial explanations of events is fascinating and troubling, few have addressed the broader impacts of the dissemination of conspiracy claims. We use survey experiments to assess whether realistic exposure to a conspiracy claim affects conspiracy beliefs and trust in government. These experiments yield interesting and potentially surprising results. We discover that respondents who are asked whether they believe in a conspiracy claim after reading a specific allegation actually report lower beliefs than those not exposed to the specific claim. Turning to trust in government, we find that exposure to a conspiracy claim has a potent negative effect on trust in government services and institutions including those unconnected to the allegations. Moreover, and consistent with our belief experiment, we find that first asking whether people believe in the conspiracy mitigates the negative trust effects. Combining these findings suggests that conspiracy exposure increases conspiracy beliefs and reduces trust, but that asking about beliefs prompts additional thinking about the claims which softens and/or reverses the exposure’s effect on beliefs and trust.
... While it is thought that certain media contents and attitudes can foster or mitigate beliefs in CTs, the literature is scarce (e.g., Einstein & Glick, 2015;Strömbäck et al., 2023;Walter & Drochon, 2022), especially in relation to conspiracy thinking. For this reason, our literature review stems from the broader research background on CTs. ...
... Trust in politicians is another critical variable, as political distrust has been consistently linked to a higher propensity for conspiracy thinking (Einstein & Glick, 2015;Walter & Drochon, 2022). This relationship might reflect political alienation and a sense of exclusion from the political system (Einstein & Glick, 2015;Walter & Drochon, 2022). ...
... Trust in politicians is another critical variable, as political distrust has been consistently linked to a higher propensity for conspiracy thinking (Einstein & Glick, 2015;Walter & Drochon, 2022). This relationship might reflect political alienation and a sense of exclusion from the political system (Einstein & Glick, 2015;Walter & Drochon, 2022). Additionally, exposure to CTs tends to erode political trust since their narratives include cynicism and a fundamental distrust of the government (Einstein & Glick, 2015), suggesting that lowering one's institutional and political trust results from exposure to CTs. ...
This study explores the associations between the media, media-related political variables, and conspiracy thinking, utilizing representative data from 2,340 Czech adults. Trust in journalists is a pivotal media factor related to thinking less conspiratively. Higher trust in politicians is associated with lower conspiracy thinking. Additionally, the interaction between journalistic and political trusts shows that politically distrustful people who trust journalists have lower conspiracy thinking. These findings underscore the importance of comprehensively addressing media and political factors, emphasizing their interconnected impact on the understanding and mitigation of conspiracy thinking.
... Previous studies have demonstrated the (mostly) negative effects of conspiracy belief across various political and social domains (see for an overview, Pilch et al., 2023). Existing studies concerned with the consequences of conspiracy theories for political behavior have largely focused on the link between conspiracy belief and unconventional or illegal forms of political participation (e.g., Imhoff et al., 2021;Mari et al., 2017), (far-right) voting behavior Lamberty et al., 2018;Pickel et al., 2022), institutional trust (e.g., Einstein & Glick, 2015;Mari et al., 2022;Nera et al., 2022), or affinity towards violence (Pickel et al., 2022;Rottweiler & Gill, 2020;Vegetti & Littvay, 2021). ...
... Synthesizing the literature on alternative decision-making preferences with the literature on conspiracy beliefs, multiple lines of argument can be identified which all point towards a rejection of representative democracy by people believing in conspiracy theories. First, following the explanation suggested by the disaffection hypothesis, citizens with low levels of institutional trust and external efficacy (i.e., a feeling of political powerlessness) will support alternatives to representative democracy (Bengtsson & Mattila, 2009;Coffe & Michels, 2014;Dalton et al., 2001;Gherghina & Geissel, 2019)-both factors have been identified as correlates of conspiracy belief by various studies (e.g., Einstein & Glick, 2015;Mari et al., 2022). ...
Conspiracy theories gained considerable attention during the Covid-19 pandemic. Although studies have extensively explored their (mostly) negative impacts on various political and social aspects, like participation, health-related behavior, and violence, their influence on support for democracy remains relatively unexplored. The few existing studies offer conflicting findings, prompting my focus to shift from assessing generic support for democracy to examining preferences for alternative decision-making models. To address some limitations of prior research on alternative models of decision-making, I combine a trade-off item with a ranking methodology: respondents were prompted to indicate their first and second preferences for different democratic and non-democratic models over representative democracy. The study is based on data from a representative survey in Germany (July/August 2022; N = 2,536). My findings confirm that the belief in conspiracy theories is positively associated with a preference for direct democratic decision-making. However, conspiracy believers also favor expert-based decision-making over elected politicians—but direct democracy would be their primary choice. Although the evidence for a preference for autocracy over representative democracy is associated with a higher degree of uncertainty, it does suggest that conspiracy believers tend to favor “anything but” representative democracy. These findings contribute to the broader discourse on the impact of conspiracy beliefs on democratic systems.
... Estratégias para deslegitimar o consenso científico são frequentemente adotadas e seus impactos sociais têm sido amplamente analisados em estudos sobre a circulação de desinformação. A exposição excessiva a esse tipo de conteúdo pode diminuir a adesão da população a recomendações oficiais de saúde [Bridgman et al., 2020;Enders et al., 2020], reduzir a confiança em informações e em instituições oficiais [Einstein & Glick, 2015;Jolley & Douglas, 2014b], além de minimizar a intenção das pessoas de se vacinar [Jolley & Douglas, 2014a;Roozenbeek et al., 2020] e de obedecer ao calendário vacinal [Callaghan et al., 2019]. ...
Neste estudo, analisamos as coberturas da “Folha de S. Paulo” e da “Gazeta do Povo” referentes à conduta do Conselho Federal de Medicina (CFM) ao longo da pandemia de Covid-19. Usando análise de conteúdo, buscamos compreender como os jornais abordaram a atuação do CFM diante de temas como o tratamento e a vacinação contra a doença. O “tratamento precoce” foi o tema central (40%) e “Políticos” (28%) foram os atores mais citados pelos jornais. Considerando o posicionamento dos textos, 96% daqueles publicados pela Gazeta defenderam o CFM, enquanto 98% daqueles veiculados pela Folha foram contrários ao órgão.
... As demonstrated in previous studies (Bruder & Kunert, 2022;Einstein & Glick, 2014;Miller et al., 2016), our study also highlights that distrust in authorities contributes to conspiracy mentality. People from all over the world frequently question the reliability of official institutions such as the Ministry of Health and vaccine-producing companies (Ball, 2020), which may have further influenced their tendency towards conspiratorial thinking. ...
The aim of this study is to investigate the psycho-political factors (i.e., the sense of control loss, trust in authorities, conspiracy mentality, dichotomous thinking, and intolerance of uncertainty) underlying the vaccine hesitancy that may adversely affect the fight against pandemics such as COVID-19. The sample consisted of 209 university students (75.12%) and staff (24.88%). Participants completed a package of questionnaires, including Vaccine Hesitancy Scale, Dichotomous Thinking Inventory, Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire, alongside with questions aimed to measure Trust in Authorities, and Loss of Control during pandemic. The results of serial mediational analysis showed that the sense of control loss during pandemic led to vaccine hesitancy via distrust in authorities, conspiracy mentality, and dichotomous thinking. These results indicate the need to take measures to reduce ambiguity in public communications and to build trust between the authorities and the public in order to maintain a psychologically and politically healthy environment.
... Regarding the definition of conspiracy theories, most studies emphasize the content of conspiratorial narratives, defining them as assertions about the existence of a "secret plot between powerful people or organizations" (e.g., Chen et al. 2020;Mahl et al. 2022;Wood and Douglas 2015). Beliefs in conspiracy theories have been linked to antidemocratic attitudes, political extremism, antisocial behavior, rejection of science, decreased trust in government, a lack of civic engagement, and prejudice against vulnerable minority groups (e.g., Einstein and Glick 2015;Imhoff and Bruder 2014;Imhoff et al. 2022;Jolley and Douglas 2014;Lewandowsky and Oberauer 2016;Sternisko et al. 2020). ...
Conspiracy beliefs have become a focus of media attention in recent years. Especially during the Covid‐19 pandemic, it has become evident that conspiracy beliefs are not just a harmless phenomenon but can actually pose a challenge to social cohesion. This paper hypothesizes that tolerance for ambiguity—the ability to deal with ambiguous stimuli and situations—plays an important role in the emergence of Covid‐19 conspiracy beliefs. Theoretically, the connection between tolerance for ambiguity and the emergence of conspiracy beliefs can be understood as an epistemic motivation—a desire for understanding, accuracy, and subjective certainty. Empirically, few studies have examined this relationship, and those that have found only small negative associations. However, these assessments were conducted using unreliable scales for measuring tolerance for ambiguity and neglected the concept of right‐wing authoritarianism, which is associated with tolerance for ambiguity and can become salient during times of crisis, such as a pandemic. To reexamine this relationship, a survey instrument for tolerance for ambiguity, recently validated for the German‐language context, was applied. The data for this study were collected via an online panel surveyed between November 2020 and June 2021. After identifying confounding variables using directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), random‐effects panel models are computed using data from two waves (n = 3819 observations, N = 2244 persons). To test the mediation assumption regarding right‐wing authoritarianism, structural equation modeling (SEM) was applied to data from the second wave. Results show that tolerance for ambiguity has no significant direct impact on Covid‐19 conspiracy beliefs, but an indirect effect via right‐wing authoritarianism.
... Such conspiracy beliefs directly implicate a clear target (immigrants) and/or conspirator (the government) and are therefore likely to foster actions designed to hold that government to account via conventional forms of collective action 16,23 . At the same time, conspiracy theories provide narratives that question the fairness and legitimacy of processes that authorities use to make decisions and have been shown to decrease trust in government institutions (even if the theory is unrelated to those institutions 24 . A conspiracy mindset correlates negatively with trust in government institutions and their processes 13 . ...
Despite widespread speculation that conspiracy beliefs foster anti-democratic outcomes, the empirical picture is inconsistent. To clarify this literature, we examine the relationships that conspiracy beliefs have with commitment to reactionary action and criticism of democracy, focusing on a global issue: immigration. We expected that people who believe that their government uses immigration to diversify the population against citizens’ wishes (anti-migration conspiracy beliefs) would be more committed to conventional and violent action to oppose immigration, and more critical of democracy. However, societal-level factors – economic performance and democratic functioning – were expected to influence (strengthen, weaken) these links. As hypothesized, multi-level analyses (N = 4353) from 21 countries revealed that economic prosperity attenuated the positive link between anti-migration conspiracy beliefs and commitment to reactionary action. Paradoxically, more democratic societies evidenced stronger links between conspiracy beliefs and conventional (but not violent) action to oppose immigration. Thus, more democratic societies appear to invite conventional forms of action to oppose immigration which may, in turn, weaken democratic norms of inclusion. Results highlight the interplay of individual- and societal-level factors underlying illiberal movements.
... Blootstelling aan complottheorieën zou de drempel tot normovertredend of crimineel gedrag en extremisme verlagen en de acceptatie van geweld doen toenemen (Jolley, Douglas, Leite & Schrader, 2019;Jolley & Paterson, 2020). Op het niveau van de sa menleving als geheel is geobserveerd hoe het vertrouwen in de overheid daalt na alleen al de blootstelling aan een complottheorie (Einstein & Glick, 2015). Nauw hieraan ver want zijn de aangetroffen verbanden tussen complotdenken en vervreemding van het politieke stelsel/anomie (Pummerer et al., 2022;J.W. Van Prooijen, 2011). ...
Mid-2020, during the coronavirus pandemic, a story about alleged satanic child abuse in the Dutch village Bodegraven began circulating on the internet. In February 2021, the municipality gained "worldwide attention" when large groups of people responded to repeated online calls to lay flowers at the local cemetery in memory of the alleged victims. The local authorities were faced with the challenge of addressing the excesses of the conspiracy theory. The book "Flowers at the Cemetery" shows how this was handled and the lessons we can learn from "the Bodegraven case."
The conspiracy theory, fueled by four, later three central figures ("moral entrepreneurs", in terms of Moral Panic Theory), contained elements of the QAnon ideology and quickly gained traction. The "instigators" combined expressions of outrage over the (concealment of) satanic-pedosexual practices with dissatisfaction about the handling of the coronavirus pandemic and other anti-government sentiments, all shared online via YouTube, Telegram channels, and groups. At the same time, they fostered a strong sense of community among their followers, both online and offline.
The case became highly visible when people from near and far came to the local cemetery to lay flowers in memory of the alleged victims. This caused great distress among the bereaved and those who were accused of the alleged crimes. Meanwhile, local authorities, after investigation, had concluded that the story could not possibly be true, and they were confronted with disturbances to public order and grave peace at the cemetery, (serious) threats against alleged key figures, as well as protests and threatening situations for their own staff.
In the book "Flowers at the Cemetery", the approach that local government, the police, and the Public Prosecutor’s Office developed and implemented from 2020 to 2023 (with a small extension into 2024) is meticulously reconstructed. It clearly illustrates how an apparently local issue quickly turned into a national matter. It also shows how vulnerable our society has become to disinformation and how important it is to take people and their grievances seriously and keep the conversation going.
... Conspiracy theory beliefs are harmful to society because they have consequences for their targets: institutions, ideas, groups, and individuals that enjoy or are perceived to enjoy power and admiration in wider society (Barnes et al. 2018;Jolley et al. 2022). Conspiracy theories negatively affect individuals in targeted groups (Jolley et al. 2024), weaken trust in public bodies and civic society (Einstein and Glick 2015), and undermine initiatives that tackle critical problems such as climate change (Lewandowsky et al. 2013) or global health emergencies (Grebe and Nattrass 2012;Romer and Jamieson 2020). For those who feel disadvantaged, accepting and propagating conspiracy theories can and does undermine the status of professionals and institutions, while at the same time maintaining the theorists' own ego, identity, and autonomy when these might otherwise feel challenged (Barnes et al. 2018;Douglas et al. 2019;Lantian et al. 2017;van Prooijen 2020). ...
Science denialism is at the heart of many conspiracy theory beliefs. We propose that such beliefs are manifestations of a distal social process: spite. In three pre‐registered studies, we test the hypothesis that established predictors of these beliefs (epistemic, existential, and social motives) are specific cues of competitive disadvantage that provoke a common facultative “spiteful” psychological response, making a person more open to believing in conspiracy theories. Study 1 (N = 301; UK representative Prolific sample), found that spite mediated the relationship between realistic threat and in‐group narcissism (social motives), political powerlessness (existential motive), and intolerance for uncertainty (epistemic motive), and conspiracy theory belief and COVID‐19 conspiracies. This pattern was replicated in Study 2 (N = 405; UK representative Prolific sample). In Study 3 (N = 405; UK representative Prolific sample), we found that those who engaged in a spite‐inducing task reported higher levels of spite which indirectly resulted in stronger beliefs in conspiracy theories. The overall pattern of results provides initial evidence that spite may play a role in why people engage with false information. Research and policy implications of these findings are discussed.
... Political scientists Eric Oliver and Thomas Wood argue that "conspiracy theories are simply another type of political discourse that provides a frame of interpretation for public events" (Oliver & Wood, 2014, p. 953). It is well-known that belief in political conspiracy theories decreases voter engagement and trust in government, eroding democracy over time (Einstein & Glick, 2015;Uscinski & Parent, 2014). However, even nonpolitical conspiracy theories contribute to a lack of faith in democratic institutions and politics (Invernizzi & Mohamed, 2023). ...
... Similar findings corroborate these results. For example, Einstein and Glick (2015) demonstrated that people who read about conspiracy allegations reported lower trust in politics compared to a control condition. Uscinski and Parent (2014) found that conspiracy theorising was associated with lower motivation to engage in political action. ...
Conspiracy theories are a common feature of social and political debate, and of growing concern for governments and policymakers. Awareness of the importance of conspiracy theories has been facilitated by a rapid expansion of empirical research in the past 20 years, and the bulk of this research comes from social psychology. In the current chapter, we review this significant research progress, focusing on the antecedents of conspiracy
beliefs and their consequences. As we review this literature, we refer to examples from our ongoing research programme. We then articulate what we perceive to be the main limitations of the research to date focusing on measurement, sampling and theoretical focus, and propose avenues for future research. Finally, we briefly discuss interventions to address the effects of
conspiracy theories.
... On the one hand, given that many of the election conspiracy beliefs fundamentally reflect skepticism about the legitimacy of a core democratic process (i.e., holding free and fair elections), conspiracy beliefs should weaken support for the prevailing democratic systems of government, that is, representative democracy (Albertson & Guiler, 2020). Einstein and Glick (2015) demonstrated that exposure to a conspiracy claim weakened trust in government institutions, even if the theory was unrelated to those institutions. Moreover, conspiracy beliefs that perpetuate the view that democracy is a flawed or problematic system of government (i.e., that it is too slow or too concerned with minority views, "correctness" and consensus) should promote support for authoritarian forms of rule where absolute power is concentrated among a small number of people (Papaioannou et al., 2023). ...
There are widespread concerns that conspiracy theories undermine democracies. But do conspiracy beliefs increase criticism of democracy and/or support for authoritarianism? Or are antidemocratic people more likely to endorse conspiracy beliefs? To answer these important questions, we collected longitudinal data during two concurrent democratic elections—the 2020 US Presidential Election ( N = 609) and the 2020 General Election in New Zealand ( N = 603). Random intercept cross‐lagged panel models tested whether conspiracy beliefs affect criticism of democracy in general, as well as support for authoritarianism, and both direct and representative democracy, specifically. There was little evidence that conspiracy beliefs temporally preceded changes in attitudes toward democracy or support for any specific form of government. Instead, people who supported authoritarianism more subsequently endorsed stronger conspiracy beliefs. The results suggested that, in the context of electoral contests (e.g., elections), antidemocratic people are more likely to endorse conspiracy beliefs rather than conspiracy beliefs fostering antidemocratic views.
... Indeed, employees easily may distrust a group of managers without necessarily believing them to be part of a malevolent conspiracy. Accumulating empirical research has underscored that conspiracy beliefs and distrust are related yet distinct constructs (e.g., Abalakina-Paap et al., 1999;Einstein & Glick, 2015;Pantazi et al., 2022;Pummerer et al., 2022). In fact, a meta-analysis indicates that dispositional trust is negatively but moderately related to a tendency to believe conspiracy theories, and various other variables display a stronger correlation (e.g., feelings of threat; delusion-proneness; Bowes et al., 2023). ...
How employees perceive their leaders' power can influence their view and treatment of organizations. This study examines how employees' perceptions of their leaders' power construal—primarily as responsibility (PaR) or primarily as opportunity (PaO)—influence employee malevolent creativity towards the organization, with organizational conspiracy beliefs mediating this relationship. We hypothesized that when leaders' power is perceived primarily as responsibility, it diminishes employee endorsement of conspiracy beliefs and, in turn, reduces malevolent creativity. Conversely, perceiving leaders' power mainly as opportunity was expected to amplify conspiracy beliefs and subsequently malevolent creativity. Study 1, a three‐wave study among employees, showed that increased PaO was positively related to employee malevolent creativity through increased organizational conspiracy beliefs. Moreover, PaR was negatively related to malevolent creativity through organizational conspiracy beliefs. Study 2 (preregistered) experimentally tested these relationships and provided support for all hypotheses. Study 3 (also preregistered) manipulated exposure to organizational conspiracy theories (the mediator) to address the ‘measurement‐of‐mediation’ issue and found that conspiracy theories increase malevolent creativity. This study demonstrates the adverse consequences of leader's power construal as opportunity through employee's organizational conspiracy beliefs.
... Modern communication technologies-despite not necessarily heralding a new era of conspiracy thinking (Uscinski & Parent, 2014)-have boosted the spread of conspiracy theories, which have generated a significant impact on belief systems (Mulligan & Habel, 2012;Swami et al., 2013;Jolley & Douglas, 2014;Einstein & Glick, 2015;Craft et al., 2017), This increase is attributed to the Web 2.0 process, online sociability that it promotes (Blommaert & Varis, 2015) and social trust while prioritising narrative over factual accurateness (Leone, 2016). In this context, conspiracy theories are embedded within a more complex concept about the post-truth era (Birchall & Knight, 2023). ...
The COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to numerous conspiracy theories, focusing on topics such as vaccine effectiveness, the virus’s origin and public health measures. These narratives have spread rapidly through social and traditional media, influencing public perception and behaviour towards vaccination efforts. In particular, they have contributed significantly to vaccine hesitancy. This study focuses on Italy, where narratives linking COVID-19 vaccinations to sudden deaths have gained significant traction. By conducting a thorough investigation into post-vaccination mortality rates, this study aims to shed light on the true nature of the data regarding deaths and mortality rates in Italy. The study uses a Difference-In-Differences (DID) framework to analyse post-vaccination mortality rates across Italian municipalities from 2018 to 2023. Results indicate that the overall mortality rate did not significantly increase following the vaccination campaign, and the impact varied across different demographic groups and regions, indicating disparities in healthcare delivery, public health strategies and demographic factors between the North and the South. This study contributes innovatively by providing empirical evidence from Italy, addressing a critical gap in understanding the relationship between vaccination and public health outcomes.
... Study 2 provided support for the hypotheses that exposure to a conspiracy theory narrative involving biobank scientists decreased policy support for biobank research, and that this effect was indirectly explained by decreased trust in scientists. Findings are consistent with research that conspiracy theories decrease trust in government institutions (Einstein and Glick, 2015) and medical authorities (Jolley and Douglas, 2014a;Natoli and Marques, 2021). They also speak to the importance of trust as a heuristic of researchers involved in complex and emerging areas of science in general (Siegrist et al., 2000) and in biobanks (Walshe et al., 2024), especially when the public is unfamiliar with these technologies. ...
Many conspiracy theories implicate scientists and science. We investigated the impact of exposure to scientific conspiracies about biotechnologies. Across three preregistered online studies ( Ns = 1,000), participants who read information about conspiracies involving agribiotechnology companies or biobank scientists were more likely to endorse conspiracies. Other effects of exposure to conspiracy information were mixed. In Study 1, reading about an agricultural biotechnology conspiracy had a small significant effect on reducing intentions to eat genetically modified food. In Study 2, exposure to a conspiracy involving biobank scientists decreased support for biobanks, mediated by decreased trust in biobank scientists. In Study 3, this conspiracy had no effect on wider beliefs of the role of science in society (science populism), nor support of genetically modified food-promoting policies. Overall, we found that exposure to conspiracies involving scientific claims increased conspiracy belief endorsement and can further negative effects. However, the effects of conspiracies on science populism appear limited.
... This phenomenon aligns with the idea that individual conspiracy theories fit into the overarching narrative that powerful clandestine actors wield significant influence behind the scenes, orchestrating certain real-life events (Miller et al., 2016;Vermeule and Sunstein, 2009). Moreover, it resonates with research suggesting that exposure to a conspiracy theory is negatively related to trust in institutional sources, extending to institutions unrelated to the specific conspiracy theory in question (Einstein and Glick, 2015). Hence, it is essential to examine if the roles of exposure and repetition play in increased beliefs in disinformation narratives, and whether the relationships are similar across the board or vary based on thematic groups. ...
Utilizing data from a representative survey conducted in four U.S. states in mid-2023, the study explores the prevalence and impact of disinformation narratives. It reveals that narratives frequently appear across different media, enhancing their potential to influence public belief significantly when repeatedly exposed. The findings highlight that increased exposure to disinformation narratives intensifies belief in them, with the content of the narratives playing a critical role in their persuasive power. This study contributes to the literature by: i) highlighting the impact of previous exposure to disinformation narratives, ii) emphasizing the importance of narrative frameworks in disinformation research and suggests that understanding the narrative construction of disinformation can lead to more effective and practical fact-checking interventions. It calls for an adjustment in current strategies to accommodate the complexities of media consumption in a hybrid ecosystem, proposing that a focus on narratives could improve the strategic reach and efficacy of interventions like fact-checking.
... Study 2 provided support for the hypotheses that exposure to a conspiracy theory narrative involving biobank scientists decreased policy support for biobank research, and that this effect was indirectly explained by decreased trust in scientists. Findings are consistent with research that conspiracy theories decrease trust in government institutions (Einstein and Glick, 2015) and medical authorities (Jolley and Douglas, 2014a;Natoli and Marques, 2021). ...
Many conspiracy theories implicate scientists and science. We investigated the impact of exposure to scientific conspiracies about biotechnologies. Across three pre-registered online studies (Ns=1,000), participants who read information about conspiracies involving agribiotechnology companies or biobank scientists were more likely to endorse conspiracies. Other effects of exposure to conspiracy information were mixed. In Study 1, reading about an agricultural biotechnology conspiracy had a small significant effect on reducing intentions to eat Genetically Modified food. In Study 2, exposure to a conspiracy involving biobank scientists decreased support for biobanks, mediated by decreased trust in biobank scientists. In Study 3, this conspiracy had no effect on wider beliefs of the role of science in society (science populism), nor support of Genetically Modified food-promoting policies. Overall, we found that exposure to conspiracies involving scientific claims increased conspiracy belief endorsement and can further negative effects. However, the effects of conspiracies on science populism appears limited.
... El World Wildlife Fund (s.f) detectó que, entre los 10 mitos más extendidos sobre el CC, tres suelen relacionarse directamente con sus causas. Además, se ha demostrado que la mera exposición a estas narrativas es motivo suficiente para que las personas sean menos proclives a aceptar los hechos contrastados (Einstein y Glick, 2015) y más reticentes a participar en las acciones de mitigación ( Van der Linden et al., 2017). A pesar de las medidas correctivas, la población suele seguir creyendo en la información falsa incluso habiendo sido informados de que se trata de bulos. ...
La presente investigación se centra en la aplicación de la teoría del framing a la cobertura periodística del cambio climático en la prensa digital española en relación con la lucha global contra la desinformación y el aumento de la desconfianza hacia los medios de comunicación. El objeto de estudio se centra en las noticias publicadas sobre la crisis climática por los dos principales diarios nativos digitales españoles: OkDiario y elDiario.es. A partir del análisis de una muestra representativa de 640 artículos (345 de elDiario.es y 295 de OkDiario), seleccionada con un nivel de confianza del 95% de un total de 4.519 noticias publicadas por ambos medios durante el 2023, identificamos las narrativas predominantes y examinamos si los métodos de encuadre adoptados podrían estar contribuyendo a la difusión de información engañosa sobre la crisis climática. Se estudiarán aspectos como la posible tendencia a la descontextualización, la escasa presencia de fuentes expertas, la falta de segmentación de la información en función del perfil de la audiencia o el cuestionamiento de hechos verificables a través de un enfoque editorial alarmista. La creciente inquietud hacia el cambio climático en 2023 ha situado esta cuestión entre las cinco principales preocupaciones de la población española. Por tanto, resultará necesario determinar el grado de influencia del framing en el posible condicionamiento de la interpretación sobre la crisis climática en la actualidad con el fin de favorecer la concienciación social y la participación de la ciudadanía española en un fenómeno de vital importancia a escala global.
... Advancements in modern media technologies have significantly contributed to the dissemination of conspiracy theories, affecting public belief systems (Mulligan and Habel 2011;Swami et al. 2013;Jolley and Douglas 2014;Einstein and Glick 2015;Craft et al. 2017), although they do not necessarily mark a new epoch of conspiracy thought (Uscinski and Parent 2014). The spread of these theories is linked to the dynamics of Web 2.0, which promotes online communities (Blommaert and Varis 2015) and a type of social trust favouring compelling narratives over empirical accuracy (Leone 2016). ...
This article explores the pervasive influence of conspiracy theories, specifically the New World Order (NWO) and Golden Billion theories, within the context of the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine. These theories form key narrative frameworks in Russian state media and global conspiracy communities, shaping perceptions of geopolitical events. This study dissects four pivotal episodes within the Russia–Ukraine conflict to illustrate how conspiracy theories shape public perception and policy direction, further entrenching ideological divides. In the first episode of the 2022 full-scale invasion, narratives of the Golden Billion were utilised to justify the attack, presenting Russia as a bastion against the Western elite’s plans to dominate the global economy and resources. The second episode examines the attack on Mariupol in 2022, framed by Russian propaganda as a necessary act to thwart the supposed expansion of NATO and the EU, underpinned by the NWO agenda aiming to dilute Russian influence in Eastern Europe. The third episode analyses the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage in 2022, interpreted by some conspiracy theorists as an act by the NWO to destabilise Europe’s energy security, thus consolidating control over energy routes and resources. The fourth episode delves into the 2024 Moscow terrorist attacks, which were seen by some as either a false flag operation conducted by Western powers or as a legitimate repercussion of Western encroachment orchestrated to weaken Russia’s resolve and international standing. Each episode is contextualised within a broader conspiratorial framework, highlighting the dualistic nature of the NWO and Golden Billion theories that paint the conflict not merely as territorial disputes but as a clash between fundamentally opposing worldviews and global orders. This narrative analysis not only underscores the role of conspiracy theories in shaping geopolitical discourse but also demonstrates their utility in mobilising domestic support, framing international criticism, and justifying military actions. Our findings suggest that these conspiratorial narratives provide a resilient, albeit misleading, lens through which supporters of the Kremlin’s policies can rationalise the war, attributing complex sociopolitical dynamics to the malevolent machinations of a global elite. This study contributes to understanding how modern conflicts are interpreted through ancient conspiratorial lenses, impacting national and international policy and public opinion.
... Albertson and Guiler 2020;Czech 2022;Pickel, Pickel, and Yendell 2020;Swami, Chamorro-Premuzic, and Furnham 2010;Yendell and Herbert 2022) as well as trust in governments and other democratic institutions (e.g. Einstein and Glick 2015;Marques et al. 2022). However, on the other side, it has been argued that conspiracy beliefs are not necessarily negatively linked to democracy Pantazi, Papaioannou, and van Prooijen (2021, 3)., for instance, find that it is associated with a 'a desire for a different form of democracy' [highlighted in original], in particular direct democracy (see also, Küppers 2024). ...
Although conspiracy theories moved to the centre of the public debate during the Covid-19 pandemic and have severe consequences on politics and society, the link between Covid-19 conspiracy beliefs and democracy has hardly been scrutinized. By combining the literature on understandings and conceptions of democracy and the literature on upward conspiracy theories, we ask whether citizens who share Covid-19 conspiracy beliefs have a specific conception of democracy. Using data from a representative survey conducted in the East German Land of Thuringia in summer 2021 and by employing a fine-grained measure of attributes of democracy, we show that Covid-19 conspiracy belief is neither significantly associated with support for the idea of democracy nor with support for non-democratic forms of government. Instead, Covid-19 conspiracy believers have a particular understanding of democracy in which power is to be taken away from the political elites of representative democracy and more control is given to citizens. ARTICLE HISTORY
... As "unsubstantiated accusatory beliefs positing small groups working in secret, for their own benefit, and against the common good" (Edelson et al. 2017, p. 933; see also Vegetti and Littvay 2022, pp. 19-21;Douglas and Sutton 2023), conspiratorial thinking has been shown to go hand in hand with populist attitudes (Castanho Silva, Vegetti, and Littvay 2017), distrust in government (Einstein and Glick 2015;Mari et al. 2022) and the domestic information environment (Invernizzi and Mohamed 2023), endorsement of political violence (Vegetti and Littvay 2022), disengagement from conventional political participation (Ard� evol-Abreu, Gil de Z� uñiga, and G� amez 2020), increased prejudice and discrimination, and science denialism (Jolley, Mari, and Douglas 2020, pp. 235-36;Douglas and Sutton 2023, pp. ...
Extant research shows that belief in conspiracy theories and conspiratorial thinking are negatively related to citizens’ perceptions about the fairness and integrity of elections. However, by exclusively focusing on the United States as only one important empirical case, previous studies have left unanswered crucial questions on the scope, generalizability, and context dependency of their empirical findings. In this research note, I aim to fill this void by providing first empirical evidence on the relationship between conspiracy beliefs and electoral-integrity perceptions across twenty-nine countries. Using high-quality individual-level data from the European Social Survey enriched with contextual-level data on the quality of elections taken from the Varieties of Democracy Project, the findings from linear mixed-effects regression models reveal that (1) conspiracy beliefs are negatively related to citizens’ evaluations concerning the integrity of national elections; (2) the specific strength of the observed individual-level relationship varies substantially across countries; and (3) the relationship between conspiracy beliefs and individual electoral-integrity perceptions depends on the contextual-level quality and integrity of elections across countries. Specifically, the results indicate that the negative relationship between conspiracy beliefs and electoral-integrity perceptions is strongest in contexts in which the actual quality of elections is high, and in which citizens have little reason to (seriously) doubt the integrity of the electoral process. These findings provide an important and hitherto missing cross-national and multilevel perspective on the nexus between individual conspiracy beliefs and electoral-integrity perceptions, highlighting that the “conspiratorial challenge” to electoral legitimacy in contemporary democracies is real and more than an “American affliction.”
... Researchers studying the consequences of conspiracy theories have largely focused on their dangers to broader communities. Some research suggests that people who are exposed to-or believe in-conspiracy theories are less likely to engage in mainstream politics such as voting and supporting political parties (e.g., Jolley and Douglas 2014a;Uscinski and Parent 2014), more likely to lose faith and trust in politicians , and lose trust in mainstream political systems generally (Einstein and Glick 2015). Conspiracy believers' distrust in the institutional system can further deteriorate their perception of social norms and ultimately translate into non-normative behaviour (Pummerer 2022). ...
Conspiracy theories abound in social and political discourse, believed by millions of people around the world. In this article, we highlight when it is important to engage with people who believe in conspiracy theories and review recent literature highlighting how best to do so. We first summarise research on the potentially damaging consequences of conspiracy beliefs for individuals, including consequences related to psychopathology. We also focus on the consequences for groups, and societies, and the importance of understanding and addressing conspiracy beliefs. We then review recent literature on how to engage with people who believe in conspiracy theories, specifically with the goal to reduce susceptibility to conspiracy theories and other types of misinformation. We focus on interpersonal strategies to communicate with individuals who believe in conspiracy theories, and large-scale strategies designed to reduce conspiracy beliefs within broader communities.
... Having well-informed decisionmakers is essential to democratic societies, while misleading information is damaging the information system (Kuklinski et al., 2000). Empirical studies have confirmed that the spread of falsehood is highly correlated with homophily, polarization, and decreasing social trust and political participation (Bessi et al., 2015;Einstein and Glick, 2015;Van Prooijen and Douglas, 2017). ...
Introduction. To encourage the public to combat online fake news and revalue truth, it is important to explore the factors that affect individual intention to combat fake news. Method. This study provides answers using survey data from a representative sample collected in the U.S. (N = 804). Analysis. We examined the impacts of planned-behaviour-theory components and prior experience of being deceived by fake news on the intentions of news verification, fake news refutation, and fact-checks sharing, with demographical characteristics, media use, and media credibility under control. The study also examined prior experience as a moderator in the models. Results. Results showed that subjective norms and prior experience of being deceived by fake news were positively correlated with intentions of all three behaviours that help to combat fake news. Prior experience moderated the effect of subjective norms on fake news refutation, and the effect of perceived control on fact-checks sharing. Conclusion. The findings of this study help scholars and industry practitioners to understand audiences’ interaction with online information and what drives audiences to combat information fakeness. Prior experience of being deceived by fake news is a significant driver.
... Overall, conspiracy theories can impair individual trust in authority (Abalakina-Paap et al., 1999;Einstein & Glick, 2015;van Prooijen & Acker, 2015) and in others (Brotherton et al., 2013;Goertzel, 1994;Leman & Cinnirella, 2013). As a result, previous studies at the individual level have found that individuals who are exposed to conspiracy theories will withdraw from many social fields, including political, environmental ( Jolley & Douglas, 2014a), health-related ( Jolley & Douglas, 2014b) and organizational behaviours (Douglas & Leite, 2017). ...
Natural resources are limited, and people often share these limited resources in groups, which creates an intergroup resource dilemma. To understand individuals' sustainable behaviours in intergroup resource dilemmas in the context of group interactions, the present research systematically investigates the effect of outgroup conspiracy theories on sustainable behaviours and preliminarily explores the internal mechanism underlying this effect. First, a survey study (Study 1) relying on real‐world intergroup relations first confirmed the negative correlation between outgroup conspiracy beliefs and sustainable intentions in intergroup resource dilemmas. Then, an online experimental study that utilized the real situation of a region in China (Study 2) tested the causal relationship between exposure to an outgroup conspiracy theory and sustainable intentions, as well as showing the mediating role of intergroup threat perception underlying this relationship. Finally, a preregistered experimental laboratory study (Study 3) further verified the causal effect of exposure to an outgroup conspiracy theory on sustainable behaviours, again confirming the mediating role of intergroup threat perception. In general, our research demonstrates that exposure to an outgroup conspiracy theory stimulates individuals' environmental neglect and reduces their sustainable behaviours by increasing their perceptions of intergroup threat when faced with intergroup resource dilemmas.
... Such beliefs can lead to behaviors such as vaccine opposition, based on false or misleading information about the safety and efficacy of vaccines, and can be detrimental to public health. As for political factors, Einstein and Glick (2015) have shown that people's political attitudes are influenced by conspiracy theories, reducing their trust in the government (Ejaz et al., 2021). This erosion of trust may further exacerbate vaccine hesitancy and hinder efforts to promote vaccination as a crucial public health intervention. ...
The vaccine hesitancy developed during the COVID-19 pandemic has spread the disease, delayed immunity, and increased death rates. Social media platforms have contributed to the spread of doubts, misinformation about vaccines. Twitter, being one of the most popular social networks in Türkiye, has become a significant platform for vaccine polarization. This study aims to examine the reasons for vaccine hesitancy and conspiracy theories developed by Turkish users on Twitter. 3939 tweets were analyzed with the hashtags #aşıyahayır (#notovaccine), #aşıolmayacağım (#Iwillnotgetvaccinated), #denekolmaTürkiye (#donotbeatestsubjectTürkiye), #aşıolmakistemiyorum (#Idonotwanttogetvaccinated). The examined categories are as follows: scientific (the highest number of comments in this category were related to medical side effects), miscellaneous (the highest number of comments were about the lack of mentioning reasons for vaccine hesitancy), conspiracy theories (the highest number of comments were about major pharmaceutical companies), and general content (opinions against administering Covid-19 vaccines to children).
... The ramifications of conspiracy theories can be profound. Consuming them erodes trust in democratic institutions both immediately afterwards (Einstein & Glick, 2015;Kim & Cao, 2016) and over time (Pummerer et al., 2020). Belief in conspiracy theories is linked to a reduced inclination towards behaviors that benefit the collective good, such as engaging in climate-friendly practices (Jolley & Douglas, 2014) or adhering to pandemic-control measures . ...
Consuming conspiracy theories erodes trust in democratic institutions, while conspiracy beliefs demotivate democratic participation, posing a potential threat to democracy. The proliferation of social media, especially the emergence of numerous alternative platforms with minimal moderation, has greatly facilitated the dissemination and consumption of conspiracy theories. Nevertheless, there remains a dearth of knowledge concerning the origin and evolution of specific conspiracy theories across different platforms. This study aims to address this gap through a large-scale, cross-platform examination of the genesis of new conspiracy theories surrounding the death of Jeffrey Epstein. Through a (semi-) automated content analysis conducted on a distinctive dataset comprising N = 8,020,314 Epstein-related posts posted on both established platforms (Twitter, Reddit) and alternative platforms (Gab and 4Chan), we demonstrate that conspiracy theories emerge early and influence public discourse well in advance of reports from established media sources. Our data shows that users of the studied platforms immediately turn to conspirational explanations, exhibiting skepticism towards the official representation of events. Especially on alternative platforms, this skepticism swiftly transformed into unwarranted conspiracy theorizing, partly bolstered by references to alternative news media sources. The present study shows how conspirational explanations thrive in low information environments and how alternative media plays a role in turning rational skepticism into unwarranted conspiracy theories.
... Conspiracy theories can have serious implications (for a review, see Jolley, Mari & Douglas, 2020). For example, it has been shown that exposure to conspiracy theories reduces trust in authorities and institutions (e.g., Einstein & Glick, 2015), decreases intentions to reduce one's carbon footprint (Jolley & Douglas, 2014a) or to get vaccinated or have one's children vaccinated (e.g., Jolley & Douglas, 2014b), discourages participation in democratic life through voting (Jolley & Douglas, 2014a), and fuels prejudice (Jolley, Meleady & Douglas, 2020) and even hostile attitudes (Bilewicz et al., 2013) towards various categories of the population. Some conspiracy theories are also suspected of contributing to the radicalization of extremist groups (Bartlett & Miller, 2010; see also Amarasingam & Argentino, 2020), and several studies have found a link between endorsing Covid-19-related conspiracy theories and expressing the intention to commit violent acts (e.g., Jolley & Paterson, 2020;Levinsson et al., 2021). ...
Objective
Research on conspiracy theories has mainly focused on psychosocial and sociodemographic factors associated with conspiracy beliefs. Little is known about factors at the nation level that provide a breeding ground for conspiracist thinking. However, an interesting finding emerges from recent international comparisons: people living in countries with a highly corrupt public sector seem to be more likely to endorse conspiracy theories. The present study aims to replicate this finding with new data.
Methods
We investigate the relationship between corruption and conspiracy beliefs across 26 Western and non‐Western countries through multiple linear regression analyses and conditional inference trees. In addition to the corruption level of these countries, our statistical models include other nation‐level factors known to be associated with the prevalence of conspiracy beliefs, namely, their levels of democracy, freedom of the press, social threat (unemployment and homicide rates), economic inequality, and human development (life expectancy, standard of living, and education).
Results
Our analyses confirm a robust link between public sector corruption and conspiracy beliefs that remains significant when controlling for these other factors.
Conclusion
We suggest that public sector corruption is fertile ground for conspiracy theories because it makes them less implausible to the public.
... Ultimately, for those predisposed to conspiratorial thinking, social media use can be associated with CT beliefs (Enders et al. 2021). Even being exposed to CTs unwittingly can increase belief in them (Einstein & Glick 2015), which matters because social media users who spread one CT often interact with multiple CTs (Krasodomski-Jones 2019). ...
Why do some conspiracy theories (CTs) remain popular and continue to spread on social media while others quickly fade away? Situating conspiracy theories within the literature on social movements, we propose and test a new theory of how enduring CTs maintain and regain popularity online. We test our theory using an original, hand-coded dataset of 5,794 tweets surrounding a divisive and regularly commemorated set of CTs in Poland. We find that CTs that cue in-group and out-group threats garner more retweets and likes than CT tweets lacking this rhetoric. Surprisingly, given the extant literature on party leaders’ ability to shape political attitudes and behaviors, we find that ruling party tweets endorsing CTs gain less engagement than CT tweets from non-officials. Finally, when a CT’s main threat frames are referenced in current events, CTs re-gain popularity on social media. Given the centrality of CTs to populist rule, these results offer a new explanation for CT popularity—one focused on the conditions under which salient threat frames strongly resonate.
... A conspiracy theory can be defined as an explanation of the occurrence of social or political events or situations that are associated with malevolent plots by powerful groups aimed at some hidden goals through systematic deception (e.g. Douglas et al., 2017;Einstein & Glick, 2015;Mari et al., 2022). Scholars have argued that conspiracy theories are not merely explanations for plots or conspiracies but are representative of beliefs that conflict with the mainstream viewpoints of authorities (Goertzel, 1994;Räikkä, 2018). ...
Thailand is one of the most popular outbound destinations for Chinese tourists. However, the conspiracy theory about trafficking Chinese in Thailand has negatively affected the resilience of the Chinese outbound market after the COVID-19 pandemic. The issue of how beliefs in the conspiracy theory affect Chinese tourists’ intention to visit Thailand is investigated in this study. An online survey with a valid sample of 452 Chinese was conducted in July and August 2023. The measurement model and structural model were tested via WarpPLS 8.0. The results of this study indicate that beliefs in the conspiracy theory arouse Chinese tourists’ distrust towards Thailand and signify that tourism boycott is a form of negative political consumption. Furthermore, the respondents react differently to the conspiracy theory based on their age and past visit experience. This study highlights conspiracy beliefs as a psychological factor affecting tourist behaviour. It also suggests that relevant conspiracy theories overshadow tourism resilience in destinations.
... At their core, conspiracy theories provide narratives that question the fairness of processes that authorities or institutions use to make decisions and, in doing so, could affect the perceived legitimacy of that authority (see also van Prooijen, 2018). Indeed, conspiracy endorsement decreases trust in government institutions (even if the theory was unrelated to those institutions; Einstein & Glick, 2015), politicians, and scientists ( Jolley & Douglas, 2014a). A conspiracy mindset also correlates negatively with trust in government institutions and their processes (Ardèvik-Avreu et al., 2020). ...
Pundits have speculated that the spread of conspiracies and misinformation (termed “misbeliefs”) is leading to a resurgence of right‐wing, reactionary movements. However, the current empirical picture regarding the relationship between misbeliefs and collective action is mixed. We help clarify these associations by using two waves of data collected during the COVID‐19 Pandemic (in Australia, N = 519, and the United States, N = 510) and democratic elections (in New Zealand N = 603, and the United States N = 609) to examine the effects of misbeliefs on support for reactionary movements (e.g., anti‐lockdown protests, Study 1; anti‐election protests, Study 2). Results reveal that within‐person changes in misbeliefs correlate positively with support for reactionary collective action both directly (Studies 1–2) and indirectly by shaping the legitimacy of the authority (Study 1b). The relationship between misbelief and legitimacy is, however, conditioned by the stance of the authority in question: the association is positive when authorities endorse misbeliefs (Study 1a) and negative when they do not (Study 1b). Thus, the relationship between conspiracy beliefs and action hinges upon the alignment of the content of the conspiracy and the goals of the collective action.
... Empowering different groups in the community, such as children, youth, women, and religious groups, can improve media literacy and help people spot misinformation . Misinformation can influence election results, undermine democracy, and impact decisions made by parents regarding their children's health (Einstein & Glick, 2015;Jolley & Douglas, 2014;Lewandowsky et al., 2017). In the political field, as highlighted by Jolley and Douglas (2013) in their findings on an experimental study, exposure to misinformation decreases people's involvement in politics. ...
The spread of ill information with or without the intention of deceiving or causing harm has negatively impacted agricultural development both in social and digital spaces. This has led to a lack of trust in adopting new technologies and practices, which has hindered the process of facilitating agricultural development. Although the study of agri-food misinformation is still in its early stages, this paper draws on a scoping review of existing literature and lessons learned from other fields, such as political science and public health, which have extensive experience in combating misinformation in social settings. The article explores how Farmer Field Schools (FFS), a popular participatory and community-based approach, can incorporate media literacy education and how a local agricultural information hub, platform approach and a relatively new approach called technology stewardship in agricultural extension can help those working in the agri-food industry combat misinformation.
... Regarding politics, endorsing conspiracy theories can be related to political radicalization (Vegetti & Littvay, 2022), reduced trust in the government (Einstein & Glick, 2015), and extremism (van Prooijen et al., 2015). ...
This work aims to evaluate the predictive effect of Social Dominance Orientation, Need for Closure, Attitudes toward Math, Paranormal Beliefs, Religiosity, and Education over General Conspiracy Beliefs (GCB) and Conspiracy Mentality (CM). Two studies were conducted with Brazilian samples. In Study 1, a higher Educational Level and being a female were negatively associated with GCB. In Study 2, Paranormal Beliefs had a positive predictive relationship with CM, while greater Religiosity was associated with lower CM. Future studies should explore the effects of mediators in the relationships found in this study and provide a better conceptualization and operationalization of conspiracy beliefs.
... Conspiracy theories tend to have largely negative social and/or psychological impacts [61]. Research shows that people who participate in conspiracy theory dialogue are less likely to vote or participate in politics in general due to a lack of trust in the political system [62][63][64]. Conspiracy theories can also be associated with prejudiced views of certain groups of people. ...
During virus outbreaks in the recent past web behavior mining, modeling, and analysis have served as means to examine, explore, interpret, assess, and forecast the worldwide perception, readiness, reactions, and response linked to these virus outbreaks. The recent outbreak of the Marburg Virus disease (MVD), the high fatality rate of MVD, and the conspiracy theory linking the FEMA alert signal in the United States on October 4, 2023, with MVD and a zombie outbreak, resulted in a diverse range of reactions in the general public which has transpired in a surge in web behavior in this context. This resulted in “Marburg Virus” featuring in the list of the top trending topics on Twitter on October 3, 2023, and “Emergency Alert System” and “Zombie” featuring in the list of top trending topics on Twitter on October 4, 2023. No prior work in this field has mined and analyzed the emerging trends in web behavior in this context. The work presented in this paper aims to address this research gap and makes multiple scientific contributions to this field. First, it presents the results of performing time series forecasting of the search interests related to MVD emerging from 216 different regions on a global scale using ARIMA, LSTM, and Autocorrelation. The results of this analysis present the optimal model for forecasting web behavior related to MVD in each of these regions. Second, the correlation between search interests related to MVD and search interests related to zombies (in the context of this conspiracy theory) was investigated. The findings show that there were several regions where there was a statistically significant correlation between MVD-related searches and zombie-related searches (in the context of this conspiracy theory) on Google on October 4, 2023. Finally, the correlation between zombie-related searches (in the context of this conspiracy theory) in the United States and other regions was investigated. This analysis helped to identify those regions where this correlation was statistically significant.
... There is a great deal of research on the effects of conspiracy belief, including research on the civic and public health effects of conspiracy belief (see : Douglas 2021;Douglas et al. 2019;Einstein and Glick 2015;Imhoff et al. 2021;Jolley and Douglas 2014;Lewandowsky et al. 2013;Pummerer et al. 2022), with many highlighting the threat that multiple truth claims may have on social institutions. However, little research has examined how epistemological instability and "decentralization" (Gosa 2011) have affected social communication in micro-interaction settings. ...
Existing research on conspiracy theories rarely examines their impact on interaction or how these theories are perceived by non-believers. We conducted in-depth interviews with twenty non-believers whose family members believed in the QAnon conspiracy theory. Using face-work as the main framework, findings reveal the role of face in the structure of encounters between believers and non-believers. Non-believing participants experienced identity violations and responded to face-threats through protective or defensive maneuvers ; corrective processes, or aggressive uses of face. The study places conspiracy belief in social context, showing how epistemic identity is asserted in interactions, and demonstrating its relevance to our post-truth era.
In an era of intergroup tensions and conspiracy theories, our study examines whether threat-mitigation news frames can counter U.S. public beliefs in China-related conspiracy theories. Using a preregistered online survey experiment, we analyzed the effects of news articles that either emphasize or mitigate threats from China. Results show that threat-emphasizing frames did not heighten conspiracy beliefs, likely due to preexisting media framing. However, threat-mitigation frames effectively reduced conspiracy beliefs and improved factual understanding of China. This underscores the potential of responsible news reporting in fostering informed views, mitigating intergroup tensions.
When do politicians dog-whistle conspiracy theories (CTs), and when do they explicitly endorse – or ‘bark’ – a CT? Over time, does the use of dog-whistles shape the degree to which politicians bark? Drawing from the models of mass communication literature, we theorize that politicians who leverage CTs to garner political support have incentives to tailor their communication to their audience. When politicians speak to general audiences, they risk being punished for explicitly endorsing CTs. However, for parties that use CTs to rally their base, dog-whistling a CT may allow politicians to covertly signal support for a CT to party faithful. Conversely, amongst audiences primarily composed of party loyalists or CT believers, politicians have strong incentives to explicitly endorse CTs. We test our theory with data from Poland, where a series of CTs emerged following a 2010 plane crash in Smoleńsk, Russia that killed the Polish president and 95 other top officials. We draw on speeches and tweets discussing the crash from 2011 to 2022 by the Law and Justice (PiS) party, which sometimes endorses these CTs. We find descriptive evidence that PiS politicians both dog-whistle and ‘bark’. While they tend to dog-whistle more when the audience is more diverse, they tend to bark when the audience is more uniformly CT-supporting. We find some evidence that politicians bark more and dog-whistle less over time, which suggests that, with sustained use, dog-whistling may become understood by a wider array of audiences.
By assuming that a group of nefarious actors collude to harm a perceiver’s ingroup, conspiracy theories are an intergroup phenomenon. What are the group-oriented motivations underlying belief in conspiracy theories? This contribution proposes that conspiracy theories are associated with both symbolic, identity-based motivations and realistic, harm-based motivations. As symbolic motivations, conspiracy theories help people develop, maintain, and protect a positive social identity. Conspiracy theories can unite people through a shared belief system, provide a basis for favorable intergroup comparison, and enable perceivers to attribute ingroup status threats to external forces beyond their control. As realistic motivations, conspiracy theories prepare people for conflict with other groups. Conspiracy theories transform an abstract sense of distrust into concrete allegations of misconduct. This provides a signal that an outgroup is threatening, mobilizes the ingroup, and promotes a readiness to fight. I discuss the implications of these processes for theory and practice.
While there is overwhelming scientific agreement on climate change, the public has become polarized over fundamental questions such as human-caused global warming. Communication strategies to reduce polarization rarely address the underlying cause: ideologically-driven misinformation. In order to effectively counter misinformation campaigns, scientists, communicators, and educators need to understand the arguments and techniques in climate science denial, as well as adopt evidence-based approaches to neutralizing misinforming content. This chapter reviews analyses of climate misinformation, outlining a range of denialist arguments and fallacies. Identifying and deconstructing these different types of arguments is necessary to design appropriate interventions that effectively neutralize the misinformation. This chapter also reviews research into how to counter misinformation using communication interventions such as inoculation, educational approaches such as misconception-based learning, and the interdisciplinary combination of technology and psychology known as technocognition.
After the collapse of the non-democratic regimes in the late 1980s and early 1990s, new democratic states emerged in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and began their state building on the wave of democratic enthusiasm. Majority of those countries, including Slovenia, entered European Union in early 2000s as consolidated well-working democracies, although public trust in democratic political institutions has been on the slow decline since gaining independence, only to drop substantially more after global economic crisis and wave of populist politics hit CEE in the last decade. Author is analyzing trends in (dis)trust levels in key political institutions in Slovenia with emphasis on the wave of conspiracy theories, which extensively spread during and after global coronavirus pandemic. Crisis events such as recent global pandemic have triggered a wave of concerns about the actual backgrounds of global crises, and those concerns eroded public trust into key political and administrative institutions and added fuel to the conspiracy theories that were often embraced by political parties and non-governmental stakeholders that exploited sometimes-legitimate concerns to their own benefits.
Önemli sosyal ya da siyasi olay ve durumların toplumda daha güçlü olarak görülen kişi veya gruplar tarafından yapıldığına inanma eğilimi olarak tanımlanan komplo teorileri, toplumlarda yaygın olarak kabul görmektedir. Komplo teorilerine inanma eğilimini etkileyen çeşitli sosyal psikolojik süreçler ve bu inanışların sosyal ve toplumsal sonuçları vardır. Bu çalışmanın amacı, komplo teorilerini sosyal psikolojik bir bakış açısıyla ele alarak, komplo inancının psikolojik kökenlerini, bireysel ve toplumsal etkilerini ve iş dünyasındaki örgütsel boyutlarını derlemektir. Alan yazındaki çalışmalar komplo teorilerine inanma ihtiyacının sebeplerini öncelikle epistemik, varoluşsal ve sosyal motivasyonlar olarak sınıflandırmışlardır. Epistemik motivasyonlar, belirsizlikle başa çıkmak ve anlam aramak için insanlara hizmet ederken, varoluşsal motivasyonlar, güvende hissetme ve kontrol sahibi olma ihtiyacını tatmin etmeye çalışır. Sosyal motivasyonlar ise insanların ait olma ve
gruplarına ilişkin olumlu bir imajı sürdürme arzusunu yansıtmaktadır. Komplo inançlarının aynı zamanda bireysel ve toplumsal faktörlerle yakından ilişkili olduğu belirtilmektedir. Kişilik özellikleri, psikopatoloji, sosyal bağlam ve siyasi etmenler, komplo teorilerine olan inancı belirleyen önemli faktörlerdir. Komplo inancına sebep olan faktörlerin yanı sıra komplo teorilerinin toplumsal ve psikolojik pek çok sonuç doğurduğu geçmiş araştırmalarda karşımıza çıkmaktadır. Bu sonuçlar, oy verme davranışlarından suç ve vergi kaçırmaya, önyargıdan dış grup ayrımcılığına kadar çeşitli alanlarda kendini göstermektedir. Komplo teorileri kişilerin hayatının büyük bir kısmını kaplayan iş yaşamında da etkilerini göstermektedir. Örgütler, kişilerin toplumsal yaşama aktif olarak katkı sağladıkları sosyal ortamlardır. Ast-üst ilişkilerinin, güç dengesizliklerinin, belirsizliklerin ve kontrol kayıplarının sıklıkla karşımıza çıktığı çalışma hayatında komplo teorilerinin ortaya çıkması kaçınılmazdır. Örgütsel komplo teorileri, hem çalışanları hem de şirketleri olumsuz yönde
etkileyebilecek, işten ayrılma niyeti, örgütsel bağlılık ve iş doyumu gibi kritik sonuçların ortaya çıkmasına sebep olmaktadır. Ülkemizde komplo teorilerinin sosyal psikolojik süreçlerine yönelik araştırmalar yavaş yavaş ilgi görmeye başlarken, çalışma hayatına yansımaları üzerine yapılan çalışmalar yok denecek kadar azdır. Bu çalışmanın amacı, öncelikle komplo teorilerinin sebep ve sonuçlarına dair geniş bir anlayış sağlamak, daha sonra da örgütsel komplo teorilerinin sebep ve sonuçlarına odaklanmaktır. Bu çalışmanın, komplo teorileri ve özellikle örgütsel komplo teorileriyle mücadelede atılacak adımları belirlemek için bir temel oluşturabileceği ve bu alandaki daha fazla araştırmayı yönlendirebileceği düşünülmektedir.
There has been a recent rise in the dissemination of misinformation worldwide, facilitated by social media and the use of technology, both of which amplify its spread. To inform interventions that can help tackle this issue, researchers have developed various taxonomies to summarize and categorize terms associated with misinformation. These taxonomies tend to focus on a subsection of terms associated with misinformation, such as fake news. In contrast, the present research provides a novel taxonomy that includes a more exhaustive list of types of misinformation based on existing taxonomies and relevant literature. A total of 51 terms were categorized on dimensions that fell under three categories: Psychological (intentionality, profit, ideological), Content (format, manipulation, facticity), and Source (audience, verifiability, agent). This taxonomy provides 9 dimensions that researchers and policymakers can use to better understand the characteristics of terms related to misinformation. In addition, terms can be clustered together so that interventions can be created to tackle like-terms.
Worldviews characterizing conspiracy theories and populism present similar core beliefs suggesting shared psychological features. Both are expressed through simplified narratives with two morally well-defined sides. Populism articulates narratives implying stark oppositions of internally homogeneous groups (“People” and “élite”) and a Manichean view of these groups (élite = evil). Conspiracy ideation is defined as a general propensity to explain impactful geopolitical events through conspiracy theories, concocted by malevolent élites to the detriment of ordinary people. The present chapter provides a literature review highlighting that individual endorsement of populist attitudes and conspiracy beliefs emerge as psychological responses to threatened basic needs. Both conspiracist and populist narratives offer the alienated masses a renewed sense of certainty and control over reality, self-or-ingroup image. Furthermore, the chapter reports empirical findings about links between conspiracy beliefs and populist attitudes with ideological belief systems such as system justification, social dominance orientation, and right-wing authoritarianism. Results show positive associations of both phenomena with authoritarianism, weak or lacking associations with social dominance orientation, and negative robust relations with system-justifying tendencies. Overall, the chapter provides an integrated perspective of the shared psychosocial roots of the endorsement of political populism and conspiracy beliefs and moves around their potential applied implications.
Resumo O elevado volume de notícias falsas, na última década, tem mobilizado ações no intuito de promover suas correções. Na educação, emergem instrumentos que visam a capacitar os estudantes para reconhecer informações enviesadas. Apesar da sua importância, nem sempre essas tentativas são suficientes, e em alguns casos podem ter efeito contrário, aumentando a convicção na desinformação. Neste contexto, a partir da teoria dos afetos de Baruch Espinosa (1632-1677), o objetivo geral deste ensaio consiste em trazer indícios que ajudem a compreender as crenças nas fake news e, consequentemente, em pensar uma educação que permita maior efetividade nas suas correções. Em termos metodológicos, propõe-se, no aprofundamento da investigação bibliográfica, resgatar as reflexões filosóficas, em especial, na obra “Ética – Demonstrada em ordem Geométrica”. Os achados apontam que a inovação ontológica no projeto espinosano consiste em indicar que os homens usam pouco a razão na constituição ética da sociedade, uma vez que são movidos por afetos que interferem nas formas como se valora o bem e o mal. Isso abre espaço para uma analogia com a dinâmica das fake news, uma vez que, nem sempre, a falta de escolaridade é o fator mais relevante para se acreditar em notícias falsas. Em contraponto, o pensamento do filósofo pode ser útil para se pensar em formas educacionais de correções das fake news, a partir da concatenação e ordenação dos afetos, em situações que atravessam as leituras de notícias falsas.
A COVID-19 világjárvány hatására számos összeesküvés-elmélet látott napvilágot, amelyeknek középpontjában a járvány kitörésének körülményei, vagy a vakcina eltitkolt manipulációs felhasználása állt (pl. biometrikus adatok gyűjtése, befolyásolás). Az ilyen konspiratív meggyőződések jelentős negatív hatást gyakorolnak az oltási attitűdre és kedvezőtlenül befolyásolják az oltási szándékot. Tanulmányunkban az oltási bizonytalanságot meghatározó tényezők azonosítására és komplex hatásmechanizmusainak feltárására vállalkozunk, melynek empirikus hátterét az „Életünk a koronavírus-járvány idején” című online, megközelítően reprezentatív mintavételű keresztmetszeti kutatás adta (N=1779, 922 nő és 857 férfi). Az alkalmazott tesztbattéria az oltási bizonytalanságot meghatározó tényezők széles körét öleli fel: pl. védőoltással szembeni attitűd, a koronavírussal összefüggő konspiratív gondolatok, bizalom a tudományban és a kormányban, félelem a COVID-tól, egészségtudatosság, stressz. Eredményeink megerősítik, hogy a koronavírussal kapcsolatos konspiratív meggyőződéseknek jelentős szerepe van az oltásellenes attitűd kialakulásában, ami pedig oltási bizonytalanságot vagy az oltás elutasítását eredményezi. Átfogó kauzális modellünk rávilágít arra is, hogy a konspiratív gondolatok a tudományba és a kormányba vetett bizalom csökkenésén keresztül közvetve is képesek negatívan befolyásolni az oltással szembeni attitűdöt, és így magát az oltási szándékot. Az oltási bizonytalanság olyan oltásspecifikus prediktorainak hatásmechanizmusát is sikerült igazolnunk, mint például a koronavírustól való félelem, vagy az influenza elleni védőoltások korábbi felvétele. Átfogó modellünk alapján az alapvető szociodemográfiai jellemzők (nem, életkor és iskolai végzettség) szerepe is hangsúlyos, bár ezek a tényezők többnyire csak közvetve hatnak az oltási bizonytalanságra. A kapott eredmények betekintést nyújtanak az oltási bizonytalanság komplex kapcsolatrendszerébe és segítenek megérteni a kialakulás folyamatát, mindezek mellett pedig hasznos gyakorlati támpontokat nyújthatnak az oltási bizonytalanság és az elutasítás csökkentését célzó beavatkozások tervezésébe.
Háttér: Az irigység témájával évezredek óta foglalkozik az emberiség, a pszichológia tudománya is szinte a kezdetektől fogva érdeklődik iránta. Nincs azonban egységes álláspont a diszpozicionális irigység konceptualizálásában, magyar mintán pedig alig van a témát érintő kutatás, holott a diszpozicionális irigység a nemzetközi kutatási eredmények alapján pszichológiai szempontból jelentősnek tekinthető. Célkitűzés: Az elemzések elsődleges célja a diszpozicionális irigység hazai kutatásának ösztönzése, azáltal, hogy feltárjuk és a nemzetiközi szakirodalom alapján megerősítjük legfontosabb korrelátumait, modellt építünk. Módszer: A mintát a Károli Gáspár Református Egyetem „Életünk a koronavírus-járvány idején” című kvázi reprezentatív mintájú kutatásában a 18. életévüket betöltő személyek adták (n = 2205). Az egyes változók közötti kapcsolatok feltárására korrelációs elemzések szolgálták, a változók közötti kapcsolatrendszer feltérképezésére modell elemzés (SEM) készült. Eredmények: A modell alapján elmondható, hogy a diszpozicionális irigység jól meghatározza a depressziót és a jóllétet. A modell a diszpozicionális irigység varianciájának 27%-át, a depresszió varianciájának 38%-át, az általános jóllét varianciájának 42%-át magyarázza. A nők és a férfiak diszpozicionális irigység szintje között szignifikáns, de elhanyagolható hatásmértékű különbség van. Következtetés: A diszpozicionális irigység és a jóllét kapcsolata mintánkon megerősítést nyert, a vizsgálatok a diszpozicionális irigység pszichológiai jelentőségét és további vizsgálatának szükségességét támasztják alá. A részletesebb elemzés a gyakorlat számára is hasznos lehet.
Conspiracy theories are particularly prevalent in times of crisis and pose a major threat to democracy. Young people are especially susceptible to conspiracy theories, as this period is characterized by high social vulnerability and constant reflection on one's position in society. However, to date little is known about the determinants of young people's belief in conspiracy theories in general and in times of crisis in particular. In this study, we address this research gap by investigating the belief of young people in Germany ( N = 2437, aged 16 to 29) in conspiracy theories about the war in Ukraine. Drawing on Douglas and colleagues’ (2017) taxonomy, we find that epistemic (e.g., political self‐efficacy), existential (e.g., political trust), and social (e.g., social exclusion) motives influence belief in conspiracies about the war among young people. However, while the taxonomy suggests equal influence of the three motives, the effects of feelings of social exclusion on war‐related conspiracy beliefs among youth are mainly mediated by a strong influence of political distrust. In this way, our findings contribute to a better understanding of conspiracy beliefs among young people and highlight the importance of increasing young people's political trust to prevent the spread of conspiracy theories.
During virus outbreaks in the recent past, web behavior mining, modeling, and analysis have served as means to examine, explore, interpret, assess, and forecast the worldwide perception, readiness, reactions, and response linked to these virus outbreaks. The recent outbreak of the Marburg Virus disease (MVD), the high fatality rate of MVD, and the conspiracy theory linking the FEMA alert signal in the United States on 4 October 2023 with MVD and a zombie outbreak, resulted in a diverse range of reactions in the general public which has transpired in a surge in web behavior in this context. This resulted in “Marburg Virus” featuring in the list of the top trending topics on Twitter on 3 October 2023, and “Emergency Alert System” and “Zombie” featuring in the list of top trending topics on Twitter on 4 October 2023. No prior work in this field has mined and analyzed the emerging trends in web behavior in this context. The work presented in this paper aims to address this research gap and makes multiple scientific contributions to this field. First, it presents the results of performing time-series forecasting of the search interests related to MVD emerging from 216 different regions on a global scale using ARIMA, LSTM, and Autocorrelation. The results of this analysis present the optimal model for forecasting web behavior related to MVD in each of these regions. Second, the correlation between search interests related to MVD and search interests related to zombies was investigated. The findings show that there were several regions where there was a statistically significant correlation between MVD-related searches and zombie-related searches on Google on 4 October 2023. Finally, the correlation between zombie-related searches in the United States and other regions was investigated. This analysis helped to identify those regions where this correlation was statistically significant.
Le teorie cospirazioniste non sono solo un elenco di
credenze bizzarre, ma ci rivelano molto sul “nostro Io più
segreto”. Poche cose sono più seducenti di un’opinione
pronta e rassicurante, poco importa se assurda. Come
ingegnose stampelle, le credenze complottistiche hanno
la funzione di sorreggere il traballante incedere lungo
un cammino in cui si incontrano pandemie, guerre,
cambiamenti climatici. Complottisti vulnerabili intreccia
i temi di bias di ragionamento, autoinganno, processi
emotivi di base attingendo ai dati della psicologia
cognitiva, clinica e sociale e dell’infant research.
L’obiettivo è quello di illustrare la “ricetta perfetta”
che alimenta la mentalità cospirazionista. Insicurezza
esistenziale e ansia generalizzata sono il primo
ingrediente. Curvatura narcisistica dello sviluppo della
personalità e condizioni di isolamento e frustrazione
sociale sono i due successivi, mentre il quarto è il
bisogno di riconoscimento sociale. Quest’ultimo dà
conto di un elemento indispensabile perché si possa
parlare di cospirazionismo: il gruppo. È all’interno di
comunità, reali o virtuali che siano, che le dinamiche
cospirazionistiche prendono le sembianze a cui assistiamo
in questi tempi. Inediti casi di sedute terapeutiche offrono
l’occasione per definire ulteriormente la complessità
del fenomeno cospirazionista e distinguerlo nettamente,
nonostante alcune chiare analogie, da forme di delirio
individuale e collettivo.
This investigation examined the boundaries of inoculation theory by examining how inoculation can be applied to conspiracy theory propaganda as well as inoculation itself (called metainoculation). A 3‐phase experiment with 312 participants compared 3 main groups: no‐treatment control, inoculation, and metainoculation. Research questions explored how inoculation and metainoculation effects differ based on the argument structure of inoculation messages (fact‐ vs. logic‐based). The attack message was a 40‐minute chapter from the 9/11 Truth conspiracy theory film, Loose Change: Final Cut. The results indicated that both the inoculation treatments induced more resistance than the control message, with the fact‐based treatment being the most effective. The results also revealed that metainoculation treatments reduced the efficacy of the inoculation treatments.
The current studies explored the social consequences of exposure to conspiracy theories. In Study 1, participants were exposed to a range of conspiracy theories concerning government involvement in significant events such as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Results revealed that exposure to information supporting conspiracy theories reduced participants' intentions to engage in politics, relative to participants who were given information refuting conspiracy theories. This effect was mediated by feelings of political powerlessness. In Study 2, participants were exposed to conspiracy theories concerning the issue of climate change. Results revealed that exposure to information supporting the conspiracy theories reduced participants' intentions to reduce their carbon footprint, relative to participants who were given refuting information, or those in a control condition. This effect was mediated by powerlessness with respect to climate change, uncertainty, and disillusionment. Exposure to climate change conspiracy theories also influenced political intentions, an effect mediated by political powerlessness. The current findings suggest that conspiracy theories may have potentially significant social consequences, and highlight the need for further research on the social psychology of conspiracism.
The widespread prevalence and persistence of misinformation in contemporary societies, such as the false belief that there is a link between childhood vaccinations and autism, is a matter of public concern. For example, the myths surrounding vaccinations, which prompted some parents to withhold immunization from their children, have led to a marked increase in vaccine-preventable disease, as well as unnecessary public expenditure on research and public-information campaigns aimed at rectifying the situation.
We first examine the mechanisms by which such misinformation is disseminated in society, both inadvertently and purposely. Misinformation can originate from rumors but also from works of fiction, governments and politicians, and vested interests. Moreover, changes in the media landscape, including the arrival of the Internet, have fundamentally influenced the ways in which information is communicated and misinformation is spread.
We next move to misinformation at the level of the individual, and review the cognitive factors that often render misinformation resistant to correction. We consider how people assess the truth of statements and what makes people believe certain things but not others. We look at people’s memory for misinformation and answer the questions of why retractions of misinformation are so ineffective in memory updating and why efforts to retract misinformation can even backfire and, ironically, increase misbelief. Though ideology and personal worldviews can be major obstacles for debiasing, there nonetheless are a number of effective techniques for reducing the impact of misinformation, and we pay special attention to these factors that aid in debiasing.
We conclude by providing specific recommendations for the debunking of misinformation. These recommendations pertain to the ways in which corrections should be designed, structured, and applied in order to maximize their impact. Grounded in cognitive psychological theory, these recommendations may help practitioners—including journalists, health professionals, educators, and science communicators—design effective misinformation retractions, educational tools, and public-information campaigns.
The dissemination and control of information are indispensable ingredients of violent conflict, with all parties involved in a conflict or at war seeking to frame the discussion on their own terms. Those attempts at information control often involve the dissemination of misinformation or disinformation (i.e., information that is incorrect by accident or intent, respectively). We review the way in which misinformation can facilitate violent conflicts and, conversely, how the successful refutation of misinformation can contribute to peace. We illustrate the relevant cognitive principles by examining two case studies. The first, a retrospective case, involves the Iraq War of 2003 and the “War on Terror.” The second, a prospective case, points to likely future sources of conflict arising from climate change and its likely consequences.
After addressing the meaning of "trust" and "trustworthiness," we review survey-based research on citizens' judgments of trust in governments and politicians, and historical and comparative case study research on political trust and government trustworthiness. We first provide an overview of research in these two traditions, and then take up four topics in more detail: (a) political trust and political participation; (b) political trust, public opinion, and the vote; (c) political trust, trustworthy government, and citizen compliance; and (d) political trust, social trust, and cooperation. We conclude with a discussion of fruitful directions for future research.
The psychology of conspiracy theory beliefs is not yet well understood, although research indicates that there are stable individual differences in conspiracist ideation - individuals' general tendency to engage with conspiracy theories. Researchers have created several short self-report measures of conspiracist ideation. These measures largely consist of items referring to an assortment of prominent conspiracy theories regarding specific real-world events. However, these instruments have not been psychometrically validated, and this assessment approach suffers from practical and theoretical limitations. Therefore, we present the Generic Conspiracist Beliefs (GCB) scale: a novel measure of individual differences in generic conspiracist ideation. The scale was developed and validated across four studies. In Study 1, exploratory factor analysis of a novel 75-item measure of non-event-based conspiracist beliefs identified five conspiracist facets. The 15-item GCB scale was developed to sample from each of these themes. Studies 2, 3, and 4 examined the structure and validity of the GCB, demonstrating internal reliability, content, criterion-related, convergent and discriminant validity, and good test-retest reliability. In sum, this research indicates that the GCB is a psychometrically sound and practically useful measure of conspiracist ideation, and the findings add to our theoretical understanding of conspiracist ideation as a monological belief system unpinned by a relatively small number of generic assumptions about the typicality of conspiratorial activity in the world.
Although nearly all domain experts agree that carbon dioxide emissions are altering the world's climate, segments of the public remain unconvinced by the scientific evidence. Internet blogs have become a platform for denial of climate change, and bloggers have taken a prominent role in questioning climate science. We report a survey of climate-blog visitors to identify the variables underlying acceptance and rejection of climate science. Our findings parallel those of previous work and show that endorsement of free-market economics predicted rejection of climate science. Endorsement of free markets also predicted the rejection of other established scientific findings, such as the facts that HIV causes AIDS and that smoking causes lung cancer. We additionally show that, above and beyond endorsement of free markets, endorsement of a cluster of conspiracy theories (e.g., that the Federal Bureau of Investigation killed Martin Luther King, Jr.) predicted rejection of climate science as well as other scientific findings. Our results provide empirical support for previous suggestions that conspiratorial thinking contributes to the rejection of science. Acceptance of science, by contrast, was strongly associated with the perception of a consensus among scientists.
People who hold strong opinions on complex social issues are likely to examine relevant empirical evidence in a biased manner. They are apt to accept "confirming" evidence at face value while subjecting "disconfirming" evidence to critical evaluation, and, as a result, draw undue support for their initial positions from mixed or random empirical findings. Thus, the result of exposing contending factions in a social dispute to an identical body of relevant empirical evidence may be not a narrowing of disagreement but rather an increase in polarization. To test these assumptions, 48 undergraduates supporting and opposing capital punishment were exposed to 2 purported studies, one seemingly confirming and one seemingly disconfirming their existing beliefs about the deterrent efficacy of the death penalty. As predicted, both proponents and opponents of capital punishment rated those results and procedures that confirmed their own beliefs to be the more convincing and probative ones, and they reported corresponding shifts in their beliefs as the various results and procedures were presented. The net effect of such evaluations and opinion shifts was the postulated increase in attitude polarization. (28 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Two experiments provided evidence for a disconfirmation bias in argument evaluation such that arguments incompatible with prior beliefs are scrutinized longer, subjected to more extensive refutational analyses, and consequently are judged to be weaker than arguments compatible with prior beliefs. The idea that people are unable to evaluate evidence independently of prior beliefs has been documented elsewhere, including in the classic study by C. G. Lord, L. Ross, and M. R. Lepper (see record
1981-05421-001) . The present findings contribute to this literature by specifying the processes by which prior beliefs affect the evaluation of evidence. The authors compare the disconfirmation model to several other models of how prior beliefs influence current judgments and present data that provide support for the disconfirmation model. Results indicate that whether a person's prior belief is accompanied by emotional conviction affects the magnitude and form of the disconfirmation bias. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Americans often complain about the current operation of their government, but scholars have never developed a complete picture of people's preferred type of government. In this provocative and timely book, John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse, employing an original national survey and focus groups, report the specific governmental procedures Americans desire. Their results are surprising. Contrary to the prevailing view that people want greater involvement in politics, most citizens do not care about most policies and therefore are content to turn over decision-making authority to someone else. People's most intense desire for the political system is that decision makers be empathetic and, especially, non-self-interested, not that they be responsive and accountable to the people's largely nonexistent policy preferences or, even worse, that the people be obligated to participate directly in decision making. In light of these findings, Hibbing and Theiss-Morse conclude by cautioning communitarians, direct democrats, social capitalists, deliberation theorists, and all those who think that greater citizen involvement is the solution to society's problems.
An extensive literature addresses citizen ignorance, but very little research focuses on misperceptions. Can these false or
unsubstantiated beliefs about politics be corrected? Previous studies have not tested the efficacy of corrections in a realistic
format. We conducted four experiments in which subjects read mock news articles that included either a misleading claim from
a politician, or a misleading claim and a correction. Results indicate that corrections frequently fail to reduce misperceptions
among the targeted ideological group. We also document several instances of a “backfire effect” in which corrections actually
increase misperceptions among the group in question.
KeywordsMisperceptions-Misinformation-Ignorance-Knowledge-Correction-Backfire
Information that is presumed to be true at encoding but later on turns out to be false (i.e., misinformation) often continues to influence memory and reasoning. In the present study, we investigated how the strength of encoding and the strength of a later retraction of the misinformation affect this continued influence effect. Participants read an event report containing misinformation and a subsequent correction. Encoding strength of the misinformation and correction were orthogonally manipulated either via repetition (Experiment 1) or by imposing a cognitive load during reading (Experiment 2). Results suggest that stronger retractions are effective in reducing the continued influence effects associated with strong misinformation encoding, but that even strong retractions fail to eliminate continued influence effects associated with relatively weak encoding. We present a simple computational model based on random sampling that captures this effect pattern, and conclude that the continued influence effect seems to defy most attempts to eliminate it.
Many social scientists want to explain why people do what they do. A barrier to constructing such explanations used to be a lack of information on the relationship between cognition and choice. Now, recent advances in cognitive science, economics, political science, and psychology have clarified this relationship. In Elements of Reason, eighteen scholars from across the social sciences use these advances to uncover the cognitive foundations of social decision making. They answer tough questions about how people see and process information and provide new explanations of how basic human needs, the environment, and past experiences combine to affect human choices. Elements of Reason is written for a broad audience and should be read by anyone for whom 'Why do people do what they do?' is an important question. It is the rare book that transforms abstract debates about rationality and reason into empirically relevant explanations of how people choose.
Renowned political scientist Alan I. Abramowitz presents a groundbreaking argument that the most important divide in American politics is not between left and right but rather between citizens who are politically engaged and those who are not. It is the engaged members of the public, he argues, who most closely reflect the ideals of democratic citizenship-but this is also the group that is most polarized. Polarization at the highest levels of government, therefore, is not a sign of elites' disconnection from the public but rather of their responsiveness to the more politically engaged parts of it. Though polarization is often assumed to be detrimental to democracy, Abramowitz concludes that by presenting voters with clear choices, polarization can serve to increase the public's interest and participation in politics and strengthen electoral accountability.
We examine the trade-offs associated with using Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) interface for subject recruitment. We first describe MTurk and its promise as a vehicle for performing low-cost and easy-to-field experiments. We then assess the internal and external validity of experiments performed using MTurk, employing a framework that can be used to evaluate other subject pools. We first investigate the characteristics of samples drawn from the MTurk population. We show that respondents recruited in this manner are often more representative of the U.S. population than in-person convenience samples-the modal sample in published experimental political science-but less representative than subjects in Internet-based panels or national probability samples. Finally, we replicate important published experimental work using MTurk samples. © The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology. All rights reserved.
As the end of the Millennium approaches, conspiracy theories are increasing in number and popularity. In this short essay, I offer an analysis of conspiracy theories inspired by Hume's discussion of miracles. My first conclusion is that whereas Hume can argue that miracles are, by definition, explanations we are not warranted in believing, there is nothing analytic that will allow us to distinguish good from bad conspiracy theories. There is no a priori method for distinguishing warranted conspiracy theories (say, those explaining Watergate) from those which are unwarranted (say, theories about extraterrestrials abducting humans). Nonetheless, there is a cluster of characteristics often shared by unwarranted conspiracy theories. An analysis of the alleged explanatory virtues of unwarranted conspiracies suggests some reasons for their current popularity, while at the same time providing grounds for their rejection. Finally, I discuss how conspiracy theories embody an anachronistic world-view that places the contemporary zeitgeist in a clearer light.
The validity of empirical research often relies upon the accuracy of self-reported behavior and beliefs. Yet eliciting truthful answers in surveys is challenging, especially when studying sensitive issues such as racial prejudice, corruption, and support for militant groups. List experiments have attracted much attention recently as a potential solution to this measurement problem. Many researchers, however, have used a simple difference-in-means estimator, which prevents the efficient examination of multivariate relationships between respondents' characteristics and their responses to sensitive items. Moreover, no systematic means exists to investigate the role of underlying assumptions. We fill these gaps by developing a set of new statistical methods for list experiments. We identify the commonly invoked assumptions, propose new multivariate regression estimators, and develop methods to detect and adjust for potential violations of key assumptions. For empirical illustration, we analyze list experiments concerning racial prejudice. Open-source software is made available to implement the proposed methodology.
Recent research has extended the belief-perseverance paradigm to the political realm, showing that negative information about political figures has a persistent effect on political opinions even after it has been discredited. However, little is known about the effects of false positive information about political figures. In three experiments, we find that discrediting positive information generates a "punishment effect" that is inconsistent with the previous literature on belief perseverance. We argue people attempt to adjust for the perceived influence of the false claim when the information is discredited. In this case, when trying to account for the effects of discredited positive information about a politician, people overestimate how much correction is needed and thus end up with a more negative opinion. (By contrast, people underestimate how much correction is needed to adjust for false negative information, leading to belief perseverance.) These results suggest that bogus credit claiming or other positive misinformation can have severe repercussions for politicians.
Most research on media effects in political science deals with the news media or political campaigns. Although some recent work looks at the effects of soft news on beliefs and opinions, little attention has been paid to the potential consequences of media that are fictional. Although viewers typically watch fiction for entertainment, the themes, plots, and dialogue may nevertheless influence their thoughts about politics. This article examines the effects of fiction on political beliefs. We do this in the context of an experimental design, where subjects in the treatment group watched the outlandish movie, Wag the Dog. The results show that those who watched the film were more likely to believe in a far-fetched conspiracy, namely that the U.S. government has and will fabricate a war for political gain. The findings stretch the boundaries of fictional influence by focusing on extreme, conspiratorial beliefs. We suggest that political science and communications scholars should focus greater attention on the implications of fiction for beliefs and attitudes, as the consequences can be perverse.
Conspiratorial beliefs are currently salient in both the media and among scholarly researchers. Why do people believe in conspiracy theories? This note addresses three major explanations of conspiratorial belief: informational cues, political ideology, and predispositions toward conspiratorial views. Using a national survey experiment, we test the effect of an informational cue on belief in a conspiracy theory impugning the media while accounting for partisanship and conspiratorial predispositions. Our results suggest the conditions under which conspiratorial beliefs can flourish, and provide an explanation for individual heterogeneity in the holding of conspiratorial beliefs.
Abstract will be provided by author.
This study presents a survey-based method for conducting inference into the determinants of sensitive political behavior. The approach combines two well-established literatures in statistical methods in the social sciences: the randomized response (RR) methodology utilized to reduce evasive answer bias and the generalized propensity score methodology utilized to draw inferences about causal effects in observational studies. The approach permits one to estimate the causal impact of a multivalued predictor variable of interest on a given sensitive behavior in the face of unknown interaction effects between the predictor and the confounders as well as nonlinearities in the relationship between the confounders and the sensitive behavior. Simulation results point to the superior performance of the RR relative to direct survey questioning using this method for samples of moderate to large size. The utility of the approach is illustrated through an application to corruption in the public bureaucracy in three countries in South America.
Compared to conventional interviewer-administered questions about attendance at religious services, self-administered items and time-use items should minimize social desirability pressures. In fact, they each reduce claims of weekly religious attendance by about one-third. This difference in measurement approach does not generally affect associations between attendance and demographic characteristics. It does, however, alter the observed trend in religious attendance over time: In contrast to the almost constant attendance rate recorded by conventional interviewer-administered items, approaches minimizing social desirability bias reveal that weekly attendance has declined continuously over the past three decades. These results provide support for the hypothesis that America has become more secularized, and they demonstrate the role of mode of administration in reducing measurement error.
Surveys suggest an erosion of trust in government, among individuals, and between groups. Although these trends are often thought to be bad for democracy, the relationship between democracy and trust is paradoxical. Trust can develop where interests converge, but in politics interests conflict. Democracy recognizes that politics does not provide a natural terrain for robust trust relations, and so includes a healthy distrust of the interests of others, especially the powerful. Democratic systems institutionalize distrust by providing many opportunities for citizens to oversee those empowered with the public trust. At the same time, trust is a generic social building block of collective action, and for this reason alone democracy cannot do without trust. At a minimum, democratic institutions depend on a trust among citizens sufficient for representation, resistance, and alternative forms of governance. Bringing together social science and political theory, this book provides a valuable exploration of these central issues.
A questionnaire concerning the degree of belief in 12 statements of current rumors was circulated to adults through children in 8 Syracuse schools. Attitudes toward rationing and wartime administration were also solicited. The 537 complete returns are analyzed to reveal possible factors associated with belief in rumors. Various statistical controls were tried to delimit the combined influence of several factors. The reasoning is presented in detailed research notes. The rumors were believed in one fourth of the cases. Belief was associated with previous hearing of the rumors, antirationing attitudes, suspicion of slackerism, and failure to read the Rumor Clinic column. Relationship to sex, age, or occupation is doubtful. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
What is the effect of democratic competition on the power of elites to frame public opinion? We address this issue first by defining the range of competitive contexts that might surround any debate over a policy issue. We then offer a theory that predicts how audiences, messages, and competitive environments interact to influence the magnitude of framing effects. These hypotheses are tested using experimental data gathered on the opinions of adults and college students toward two policy issues—the management of urban growth and the right of an extremist group to conduct a rally. Our results indicate that framing effects depend more heavily on the qualities of frames than on their frequency of dissemination and that competition alters but does not eliminate the influence of framing. We conclude by discussing the implications of these results for the study of public opinion and democratic political debate.
Although some scholars have argued that authoritarianism is characteristic only of the right and not of the left, persuasive reasons exist for doubting this claim. Intuitive observation of left-wing and right-wing regimes as well as radical political movements of the left and right reveals striking parallels in their styles of political engagement, their reliance upon force, their disdain for democratic ideals and practices and their violations of civil liberties. In addition, systematic inquiry into the similarities and differences between far-left and far-right radicals in the United States has been hampered by various methodological difficulties. One can list, among these, such problems as the obvious inappropriateness of the F scale (owing to its strong right-wing content) as a measure for identifying left-wing authoritarians; the difficulty of obtaining adequate samples of true believers of the extreme left and right; the self-image of the American left as a persecuted minority which, for reasons of self-interest, spuriously inflates the degree of support expressed by its members for individual rights and liberties; and the exposure of both extreme camps to the liberal democratic values dominating American political culture, which unmistakably colours their political rhetoric.
We have reason to think that a similar study conducted in some – perhaps many – European countries would reveal even greater similarities between the far left and far right than we have turned up in the United States. Unlike the United States, which has enjoyed a strong liberal democratic tradition that has served to weaken and soften the intensity of its radical movements, a number of European countries, less wedded to liberal democratic principles, have developed a more vigorous, less diluted tradition of radical politics. These nations have long had to contend with powerful extremist movements actively and significantly engaged in the political struggles of their respective nations. The radical movements of Europe have been more extreme and zealous – more unequivocally revolutionary and reactionary – than the radical movements of the United States. The sustained confrontation of these extremist movements, in our view, is likely to have intensified the authoritarian propensities of each.
In the present article, through a series of surveys in which we have tried to idenify, as best we can, supporters of the far left and far right, we have systematically compared the two camps on a variety of political and psychological characteristics. We find, in keeping with the conventional view, that the far left and the far right stand at opposite end of the familiar left–right continuum on many issues of public policy, political philosophy and personal belief. They hold sharply contrasting views on questions of law and order, foreign policy, social welfare, economic equality, racial equality, women's rights, sexual freedom, patriotism, social conventions, religion, family values and orientations towards business, labour and private enterprise.
Nevertheless, while the two camps embrace different programmatic beliefs, both are deeply estranged from certain features of American society and highly critical of what they perceive as the spiritual and moral degeneration of American institutions. Both view American society as dominated by conspiratorial forces that are working to defeat their respective ideological aims.
The degree of their alienation is intensified by the zealous and unyielding manner in which they hold their beliefs. Both camps possess an inflexible psychological and political style characterized by the tendency to view social and political affairs in crude, unambiguous and stereotypical terms. They see political life as a conflict between ‘us’ and ‘them’, a struggle between good and evil played out on a battleground where compromise amounts to capitulation and the goal is total victory.
The far left and the far right also resemble each other in the way they pursue their political goals. Both are disposed to censor their opponents, to deal harshly with enemies, to sacrifice the well-being even of the innocent in order to serve a ‘higher purpose’, and to use cruel tactics if necessary to ‘persuade’ society of the wisdom of their objectives. Both tend to support (or oppose) civil liberties in a highly partisan and self-serving fashion, supporting freedom for themselves and for the groups and causes they favour while seeking to withhold it from enemies and advocates of causes they dislike.
In sum, when the views of the far left and far right are evaluated against the standard left–right ideological dimension, they can appropriately be classifled at opposite ends of the political spectrum. But when the two camps are evaluated on questions of political and psychological style, the treatment of political opponents, and the tactics that they are willing to employ to achieve their ends, the display many parallels that can rightly be labelled authoritarian.
An abundance of survey research conducted over the past two decades has portrayed a “new South” in which the region's white residents now resemble the remainder of the country in their racial attitudes. No longer is the South the bastion of racial prejudice. Using a new and relatively unobtrusive measure of racial attitudes designed to overcome possible social desirability effects, our study finds racial prejudice to be still high in the South and markedly higher in the South than the non-South. Preliminary evidence also indicates that this prejudice is concentrated among white southern men. Comparison of these results with responses to traditional survey questions suggests that social desirability contaminates the latter. This finding helps to explain why the “new South” thesis has gained currency.
In 2001 and 2003, the Bush administration engineered two enormous tax cuts primarily benefiting very wealthy taxpayers. Most Americans supported these tax cuts. I argue that they did so not because they were indifferent to economic inequality, but because they largely failed to connect inequality and public policy. Three out of every four people polled said that the difference in incomes between rich people and poor people has increased in the past 20 years, and most of them added that that is a bad thingeven in the case of the estate tax, which only affects the wealthiest one or two percent of taxpayers. Public opinion in this instance was ill informed, insensitive to some of the most important implications of the tax cuts, and largely disconnected from (or misconnected to) a variety of relevant values and material interests. a
Political scientists have long been interested in citizens' support level for such actors as ethnic minorities, militant groups, and authoritarian regimes. Attempts to use direct questioning in surveys, however, have largely yielded unreliable measures of these attitudes as they are contaminated by social desirability bias and high nonresponse rates. In this paper, we develop a statistical methodology to analyze endorsement experiments, which recently have been proposed as a possible solution to this measurement problem. The commonly used statistical methods are problematic because they cannot properly combine responses across multiple policy questions, the design feature of a typical endorsement experiment. We overcome this limitation by using item response theory to estimate support levels on the same scale as the ideal points of respondents. We also show how to extend our model to incorporate a hierarchical structure of data in order to uncover spatial variation of support while recouping the loss of statistical efficiency due to indirect questioning. We illustrate the proposed methodology by applying it to measure political support for Islamist militant groups in Pakistan. Simulation studies suggest that the proposed Bayesian model yields estimates with reasonable levels of bias and statistical power. Finally, we offer several practical suggestions for improving the design and analysis of endorsement experiments.
This study explains how President Obama's strong association with an issue like health care polarizes public opinion by racial attitudes and race. It then shows that racial attitudes had a considerably larger impact on health care opinions in fall 2009 than they had in both cross-sectional surveys from the past two decades and in panel data collected before Obama became the face of the policy. Moreover, the experiments embedded in one of those re-interview surveys reveals that health care policies were significantly more racialized when attributed to President Obama than they were when these exact same proposals were framed as part of President Clinton's 1993 reform efforts. Dozens of media polls from 1993-1994 and 2009-2010 are also pooled together to show that the black-white divide in support for health care reform was 20 percentage points greater for President Obama's health care proposals than it was for President Clinton's plan. I conclude by discussing the political implications of this heightened polarization of public opinion by race and racial attitudes during Obama's presidency.
This paper seeks to understand what difference it makes if voters systematically consider a representative range of salient criteria before choosing a candidate, and whether the effects of such systematic processing are conditioned by political knowledge. To this end, we executed experiments during the 2000 electoral season that randomly exposed some subjects to an Analytic Hierarchy Processing (AHP) tool, which encourages systematic processing of various orthogonal decision criteria in complex choice environments. We predicted, and found, that the choices of knowledgeable voters exposed to AHP were weaker and less consistent than control group responses, suggesting that systematic processing induces integrative complexity and perhaps “analysis paralysis” among knowledgeable voters. However, we found that among less knowledgeable voters, the opposite pattern generally emerged—AHP exposure was associated with even greater reliance on party ID and ideology cues, perhaps even bolstering predispositions via projection and rationalization.
Scholars have documented the deficiencies in political knowledge among American citizens. Another problem, misinformation, has received less attention. People are misinformed when they confidently hold wrong beliefs. We present evidence of misinformation about welfare and show that this misinformation acts as an obstacle to educating the public with correct facts. Moreover, widespread misinformation can lead to collective preferences that are far different from those that would exist if people were correctly informed. The misinformation phenomenon has implications for two currently influential scholarly literatures: the study of political heuristics and the study of elite persuasion and issue framing.
Video-based media spaces are designed to support casual interaction between intimate collaborators. Yet transmitting video is fraught with privacy concerns. Some researchers suggest that the video stream be filtered to mask out potentially sensitive ...
Opinion research is beset by two major types of "artifactual" variance: huge amounts of overtime response instability and the common tendency for seemingly trivial changes in questionnaire form to affect the expression of attitudes. We propose a simple model that converts this anomalous "error variance" into sources of substantive insight into the nature of public opinion. The model abandons the conventional but implausible notion that most people possess opinions at the level of specificity of typical survey items--and instead assumes that most people are internally conflicted over most political issues--and that most respond to survey questions on the basis of whatever ideas are at the top of their heads at the moment of answering. Numerous empirical regularities are shown to be consistent with these assumptions.
When news of the O. J. Simpson verdict swept across the United States, a nation stood divided as blacks and whites reacted differently to the decision. Seldom has the racial division that permeates our society come so clearly and prominently into view. Divided by Color supplies the reasons for this division, asserting that racial resentment continues to exist. Despite a parade of recent books optimistically touting the demise of racial hostility in the United States, the authors marshal a wealth of the most current and comprehensive evidence available to prove their case. Kinder and Sanders reveal that racial resentment remains the most powerful determinant of white opinion on such racially charged issues as welfare, affirmative action, school desegregation, and the plight of the inner city. But more than a comprehensive description of American views on race, Divided by Color seeks to explain just why black and white Americans believe what they do. Kinder and Sanders analyze the critical factors that shape people's opinion on race-related issues, uncovering the relative importance of self-interest, group identity, ideological principles, as well as racial animosity. Finally, the authors explore how the racial divide has insinuated itself into the presidential election process and examine the role of political elites in framing racial issues for ordinary citizens. The most accurate and thorough analysis of American attitudes toward race and racial policies undertaken in decades, Divided by Color is destined to become a landmark work on race in America.
Telling people that a consumer claim is false can make them misremember it as true. In two experiments, older adults were especially susceptible to this "illusion of truth" effect. Repeatedly identifying a claim as false helped older adults remember it as false in the short term but paradoxically made them more likely to remember it as true after a 3 day delay. This unintended effect of repetition comes from increased familiarity with the claim itself but decreased recollection of the claim's original context. Findings provide insight into susceptibility over time to memory distortions and exploitation via repetition of claims in media and advertising. (c) 2005 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..
GOP Jobs report manipulation claims dismissed
- A Ellin
Enabling the jobs report conspiracy theory the consequences of careless coverage of friday’s unemployment numbers
- B Nyhan
Political knowledge does not guard against belief in conspiracy theories
- B Nyhan
Congressional leadership of war opinion? Backlash effects and the polarization of public support for war
- D L Kriner
- W G Howell
- DL Kriner
Partisan bias in factual beliefs about politics
- J G Bullock
- A S Gerber
- S J Hill
- G A Huber
Boosting the Sandy Hook Truther Myth: The dangers of covering fringe misperceptions
- B Nyhan