Belief in conspiracy theories, aggression, and attitudes towards political violence
In the last decade, political protest events have been rising in Western democracies. At the same time, there has been a steady increase in the diffusion of conspiracy theories in political communication, a phenomenon that has captured the interest of scholars for its growing political relevance. However, while most research focuses on the reasons why citizens believe in conspiracies, studies looking at the political-behavioral implications of such beliefs, in particular their connection to political radicalism, have been more limited. In this paper we investigate the association between people's belief in conspiracies and their propensity to endorse political violence and to legitimate radical political action. We propose a model in which belief in conspiracies mediates the impact of dispositional aggression on radical attitudes, and test it empirically on an online sample of US residents collected on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Our results suggest that conspiracy theories partially channel individuals' aggression towards political targets.