Conspiracy Formation Is in the Detail: On the Interaction of Conspiratorial Predispositions and Semantic Cues

Abstract

Significant events are frequently followed by discussions about the event's 'true nature'. Yet, there is only little evidence whether the conspiratorial reasoning of conspiracy believers and sceptics is a priori determined, or if certain characteristics of information are responsible for provoking a polarization. We investigated how depicted causation (direct vs. indirect; Study 1) and intention (strong vs. weak purposeful; Study 2) might invoke a bias in believers and sceptics regarding conspiratorial reasoning about an ongoing event, namely, whether US investigations against FIFA were more or less likely to be seen as a conspiracy against Russia to sabotage the football World Cup in 2018. We revealed that judgments of conspiracy believers and sceptics about the event's 'true nature' are not a priori divided-in fact, conspiracy formation is only affected when direct causation or strong purposeful intentions were obvious. Results point to the relevance of conspiratorial predispositions and semantic cues in conspiracy formation.

In harm’s way, but not stressed about it: On the antecedents and consequences of belief in COVID-19 conspiracy theories

“…More broadly, these significant main effects provide a replication of prior work demonstrating that events that threaten people's sense of understanding, control, and security and a general tendency to be conspiratorially-minded steer people in the direction of believing specific conspiracy theories (Brotherton et al, 2013;Grzesiak-Feldman, 2013;Klofstad et al, 2019;van Prooijen & Jostmann, 2013;Whitson & Galinsky, 2008)-and do so in an impactful, real-world context. The interactive effect of negative economic consequences and conspiracist ideation reported here adds to the relatively few empirical demonstrations of person-situation interactions reported in the literature (e.g., Gebauer et al, 2016;Nyhan et al, 2016;Uscinski et al, 2016), which underscores that though situational and dispositional variables help understand belief in conspiracy theories as independent predictors, an interactionist lens can provide the clearest picture (but see Nyhan et al, 2016).…”

“…Moreover, one study found that the positive relation between exposure to a conspiracy cue and belief in a related conspiracy theory was strongest among those highest in conspiracist ideation (Uscinski et al, 2016). Thus, conspiracist ideation seems to amplify the influence of situational factors on belief in specific conspiracy theories, though such interactive effects are relatively understudied (see Gebauer et al, 2016 andNyhan et al, 2016, for additional demonstrations).…”

Anti‐Vaccination Beliefs and Unrelated Conspiracy Theories

“…By far the most consistent predictor of specific conspiracy beliefs has shown to be other conspiracy beliefs (Goertzel 1994;swami 2012;swami, chamorro-premuzic, and furnham 2010;swami et al 2011, 2013a, 2013bswami and furnham 2012;Wood, douglas, and sutton 2011). consistent with this, several studies show that those scoring high on such measures of general conspiracy beliefs are also more vulnerable to intentionality (Brotherton and french 2015;Gebauer, raab, and carbon 2016), major-eventmajor-cause (leman and cinnirella 2007) and "jump to conclusion" biases (Moulding et al 2016), ontological confusions (i.e., anthropomorphizing inanimate entities; lobato et al 2014), and conjunction fallacies (i.e., overestimating the probability of causal relations between co-occurring events; dagnall et al 2017). Moreover, as these heuristics are similarly at work in the holding of other anomalous beliefs, research has unsurprisingly uncovered a link between conspiracy beliefs and paranormal, superstitious, and pseudoscientific beliefs (Bruder et al 2013;douglas et al 2015;drinkwater, dagnall, and parker 2012;swami et al 2013b).…”

Expertise and Conspiracy Theories

“…Take, for example, the work of Robert Brotherton and Christopher French, who argue that people who believe conspiracy theories have a greater susceptibility to the conjunction fallacy (the idea that people are more likely to believe the conjunction of A and B than A or B alone) (Brotherton and French 2014). This finding has been reported by Dieguez, Wagner-Egger, et al (2015), Swami et al (2014, Douglas et al (2016), Gebauer et al (2016, Freeman and Bentall (2017) and Franks, Bangerter, Bauer, et al (2017). Yet these mentions go beyond talk of a 'greater susceptibility;' now it is a 'tendency' or a certain 'proneness' on the part of conspiracy theorists, which ignores both the contextual D R A F T…”