Is Belief in Conspiracy Theories Pathological? A Survey Experiment on the Cognitive Roots of Extreme Suspicion

2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Radnitz ◽  
Patrick Underwood
Keyword(s):  
Personality Type ◽  
News Article ◽  
Survey Experiment ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Contextual Variables ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
Political World ◽  
The Social ◽  
Conspiracy Beliefs ◽  
Situational Triggers

What are the origins of belief in conspiracy theories? The dominant approach to studying conspiracy theories links belief to social stresses or personality type, and does not take into account the situational and fluctuating nature of attitudes. In this study, a survey experiment, subjects are presented with a mock news article designed to induce conspiracy belief. Subjects are randomly assigned three manipulations hypothesized to heighten conspiracy perceptions: a prime to induce anxiety; information about the putative conspirator; and the number and identifiability of the victim(s). The results indicate that conspiratorial perceptions can emerge from both situational triggers and subtle contextual variables. Conspiracy beliefs emerge as ordinary people make judgments about the social and political world.

Dilemmas of Distrust: Conspiracy Beliefs, Elite Rhetoric, and Motivated Reasoning

2021 ◽  
pp. 106591292110345
Author(s):  
Scott Radnitz
Keyword(s):  
Relative Weight ◽  
State Level ◽  
Motivated Reasoning ◽  
Political Rhetoric ◽  
Survey Experiment ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Conspiracy Beliefs ◽  
The Individual

Conspiracy theories are playing an increasingly prominent role worldwide in both political rhetoric and popular belief. Previous research has emphasized the individual-level factors behind conspiracy belief but paid less attention to the role of elite framing, while focusing mostly on domestic political contexts. This study assesses the relative weight of official conspiracy claims and motivated biases in producing conspiracy beliefs, in two countries where identities other than partisanship are salient: Georgia and Kazakhstan. I report the results of a survey experiment that depicts a possible conspiracy and varies the content of official claims and relevant contextual details. The results show that motivated reasoning stemming from state-level geopolitical identities is strongly associated with higher conspiracy belief, whereas official claims have little effect on people’s perceptions of conspiracy. Respondents who exhibit higher conspiracy ideation are more likely to perceive a conspiracy but do not weight motivated biases or official claims differently from people with lower conspiratorial predispositions. The findings indicate the importance of (geopolitical) identities in shaping conspiracy beliefs and highlight some of the constraints facing elites who seek to benefit from the use of conspiracy claims.

Partisanship, Individual Differences, and News Media Exposure as Predictors of Conspiracy Beliefs

2017 ◽  
Vol 95 (3) ◽  
pp. 691-713 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry A. Hollander
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Survey Data ◽  
Individual Difference ◽  
News Media ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Media Exposure ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
Fox News ◽  
Political World ◽  
Conspiracy Beliefs

Conspiracy theories are woven into America’s social and political fabric. While such beliefs help some individuals organize their political world, their popularity also raise concerns about the health of a democracy when those governed also suspect powerful forces work against their interests. The research here examines national survey data to demonstrate such beliefs have both partisan and individual difference explanations. Generic news media exposure offers little explanatory power, but exposure to Fox News programming predicts greater belief in theories critical of Democrats.

Conspiratorial Thinking and Political Constraint

2019 ◽  
Vol 83 (3) ◽  
pp. 510-533
Author(s):  
Adam M Enders
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Election Study ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
Political World ◽  
National Election Study ◽  
Political Orientations ◽  
American National Election Study ◽  
Conspiracy Beliefs ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Political Groups

Abstract  Recent research on conspiracy beliefs reveals that the general predisposition to believe conspiracy theories cuts across partisan and ideological lines. While this may signify that political orientations have no bearing on conspiratorial reasoning, it also may suggest that conspiracy theorists are simply less engaged in traditional left-right politics. In this manuscript, I consider the relationship between conspiratorial thinking and political constraint, or the extent to which individuals have a clear picture of “what goes with what” with respect to the various objects of the political world. Using the 2012 American National Election Study, I construct a measure of conspiratorial thinking, as well as several operationalizations of both ideological and group-based constraint and ideological thinking. Results show that individuals prone to conspiratorial thinking are less politically constrained—when it comes to both thoughts about issues and feelings about political groups—than their less conspiratorial counterparts. Moreover, conspiratorial thinking is positively associated with antigovernmental orientations and a lack of political efficacy, with conspiracy theorists perceiving a governmental threat to individual rights and displaying a deep skepticism that who one votes for really matters. These findings suggest that conspiratorial thinking may have broader implications for individuals’ basic conceptualization of politics.

Conspiracy Theories and Religion

2018 ◽  
pp. 411-421
Author(s):  
David G. Robertson ◽  
Asbjørn Dyrendal
Keyword(s):  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Social Function ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
Institutional Authority ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
Conspiracy Beliefs

Religious ‘beliefs’ are more often situational than propositional. Reading reported conspiracy beliefs the same way deepens our understanding of their function and appeal. Ideas shared by both religion and conspiracy theories—including the paranormal, esotericism, millennialism, and prophecy—are varieties of the rejected knowledge of the “cultic milieu.” The distrust of epistemic and institutional authority in these fields leads to a profusion of syncretic “grand explanatory narratives,” which make meaning and explain away the apparently anomalous or morally perplexing. A religious studies perspective not only clarifies the social function of such ideas, but also offers tools for understanding the people who believe in conspiracy theories in a more human and productive light.

scholarly journals Conspiracy beliefs about vaccination: Questionnaire validation

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-32
Author(s):  
Irina L. Uglanova ◽  
◽  
Alexandra M. Mikhaylova ◽  
Tatyana V. Belskaya ◽  
Anastasia V. Getman ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Quantitative Analysis ◽  
Response Style ◽  
Response Styles ◽  
Questionnaire Validation ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
The Social ◽  
Measurement Tools ◽  
Questionnaire Version ◽  
Conspiracy Beliefs ◽  
Russian Universities

Vaccination in light of the COVID-19 pandemic is a hot topic in scientific and popular circles. The article presents the adaptation and validation of the questionnaire measuring the propensity to believe in conspiracy theories regarding vaccination (Vaccine Conspiracy Beliefs Scale). The questionnaire consists of 7 statements with 7 response categories in the Likert scale. The work includes translation and adaptation for the Russian sample of the Englishlanguage version of the questionnaire, including forward and backward translation as well as the use of cognitive laboratories. The translation was carried out by three experts, followed by the finalization of the questionnaire version for quantitative analysis. The cognitive laboratory tested how clear the translation and the investigated construct were for respondents. Data analysis was conducted within the framework of modern testing theory using models from Rasch modeling. The sample consisted of 308 students from Russian universities (average age 20.6 years; SD = 3.9). The quantitative analysis showed satisfactory psychometric characteristics of the questionnaire. A deeper analysis revealed that the sample is divided into two latent classes according to the response style of the test takers. The response style is a specific characteristic of the test-taker, which makes it possible to closer examine the reasons why the testtaker has chosen one or another response option. The study of response styles is an underrepresented area in domestic research and the article contributes to the development of this area while also emphasizing the need to study response styles when using questionnaires. Overall, the article details the methodology for validating measurement tools in the social sciences.

What Can We Learn From Factorial Surveys About Human Behavior?

Methodology ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Knut Petzold ◽  
Tobias Wolbring
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Behavioral Intentions ◽  
Actual Behavior ◽  
Full Time ◽  
Factorial Survey ◽  
Survey Experiment ◽  
Intended Behavior ◽  
The Social ◽  
Survey Experiments ◽  
High Level

Abstract. Factorial survey experiments are increasingly used in the social sciences to investigate behavioral intentions. The measurement of self-reported behavioral intentions with factorial survey experiments frequently assumes that the determinants of intended behavior affect actual behavior in a similar way. We critically investigate this fundamental assumption using the misdirected email technique. Student participants of a survey were randomly assigned to a field experiment or a survey experiment. The email informs the recipient about the reception of a scholarship with varying stakes (full-time vs. book) and recipient’s names (German vs. Arabic). In the survey experiment, respondents saw an image of the same email. This validation design ensured a high level of correspondence between units, settings, and treatments across both studies. Results reveal that while the frequencies of self-reported intentions and actual behavior deviate, treatments show similar relative effects. Hence, although further research on this topic is needed, this study suggests that determinants of behavior might be inferred from behavioral intentions measured with survey experiments.

Multiple-source Record Linkage in a Rural Industrial Community, 1680–1820

1994 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 133-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve King
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Life Cycles ◽  
Multiple Source ◽  
Demographic Analysis ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Industrial Community ◽  
The Social ◽  
Broad Outline

Re-creating the social, economic and demographic life-cycles of ordinary people is one way in which historians might engage with the complex continuities and changes which underlay the development of early modern communities. Little, however, has been written on the ways in which historians might deploy computers, rather than card indexes, to the task of identifying such life cycles from the jumble of the sources generated by local and national administration. This article suggests that multiple-source linkage is central to historical and demographic analysis, and reviews, in broad outline, some of the procedures adopted in a study which aims at large scale life cycle reconstruction.

»Sometimes you just have to go in « – The link between conspiracy beliefs and political action

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pia Lamberty ◽  
David Leiser
Keyword(s):  
Longitudinal Study ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Conspiracy Beliefs ◽  
Violent Action ◽  
One Year

Even though conspiracy theories often address political issues, the question of how conspiracy beliefs affect people's political action has not been satisfyingly answered. We show how conspiracy beliefs are linked to political action. Study 1 (N = 203) shows that conspiracy beliefs were linked to violence. Study 2 (N = 268) supported the notion that conspiracy beliefs were linked to weaker support for normative actions and stronger support of violent action. In Study 3 (N = 180), we explored experimentally whether conspiracy beliefs increase violent action. The longitudinal Study 4 (N T1 = 523, N T2 = 274, N T3 = 199) showed over a timespan of one year that conspiracy beliefs increased non-normative political action.

Political psychology in the digital (mis)information age: A model of news belief and sharing

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay Joseph Van Bavel ◽  
Elizabeth Ann Harris ◽  
Philip Pärnamets ◽  
Steve Rathje ◽  
Kimberly Doell ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Risk Factors ◽  
Cognitive Psychology ◽  
Information Age ◽  
Policy Research ◽  
Integrative Model ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
The Social

The spread of misinformation, including “fake news,” propaganda, and conspiracy theories, represents a serious threat to society, as it has the potential to alter beliefs, behavior, and policy. Research is beginning to disentangle how and why misinformation is spread and identify processes that contribute to this social problem. We propose an integrative model to understand the social, political, and cognitive psychology risk factors that underlie the spread of misinformation and highlight strategies that might be effective in mitigating this problem. However, the spread of misinformation is a rapidly growing and evolving problem; thus scholars need to identify and test novel solutions, and work with policy makers to evaluate and deploy these solutions. Hence, we provide a roadmap for future research to identify where scholars should invest their energy in order to have the greatest overall impact.

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