Since belief in CTs has significant practical consequences, it is important to understand their associated psychological and social factors. Moreover, CT belief correlates with political extremism ( van Prooijen et al., 2015), and generalized CT beliefs have been argued to be precursors of terrorism-endorsing beliefs ( Bartlett and Miller, 2010). In broader terms, CT belief and exposure is associated with feelings of powerlessness ( Abalakina-Paap et al., 1999 Jolley and Douglas, 2014b), which, for specific anti-government and climate change CTs decreases conventional political engagement and pro-environmental intentions. In the United States, belief that birth control and HIV/AIDS are forms of genocide against African Americans is associated with negative attitudes toward contraception ( Bogart and Thorburn, 2006). Similar society-wide public health implications arose for polio vaccination in Nigeria ( Falade and Bauer, 2017), where the vaccine was seen as the instrument of a Western birth-control plot. For example, exposure to anti-vaccine CTs decreases people’s intentions to vaccinate ( Jolley and Douglas, 2014a). Since societal complexity and uncertainty appear to be increasing, conspiratorial thinking may increase as a response (e.g., Aupers, 2012).Ī range of practical consequences of belief in CTs has been documented. CTs involve symbolic coping which transmutes the diffuse anxiety arising from such events into specific threats caused by the purportedly malevolent action of powerful actors (e.g., Harrison and Thomas, 1997 Wagner-Egger and Bangerter, 2007 Byford, 2011). The use of conspiracy theories (CTs) to make sense of destabilizing events (like the assassination of major public figures, the unpredicted destruction of major public buildings, sudden infectious disease outbreaks) is a widespread response to world complexity (e.g., van Prooijen, 2011). For many, the CT worldview may rather constitute the ideological underpinning of a nascent pre-figurative social movement.Įxplaining complex societal events is itself complex. These findings are at odds with the typical image of monological CT believers as paranoid, cynical, anomic and irrational. Our findings converge with prior explorations of CT beliefs but also revealed novel aspects: A sense of community among CT believers, a highly differentiated representation of the outgroup, a personal journey of conversion, variegated kinds of political action, and optimistic belief in future change. We also describe an ascending typology of five types of CT believers, which vary according to their positions on each of these dimensions. The worldview is structured around six main dimensions: the nature of reality, the self, the outgroup, the ingroup, relevant social and political action, and possible future change. Using several strategies to address the access problem we were able to engage CT believers in semi-structured interviews, combining their results with analysis of media documents and field observations to reconstruct a conspiracy worldview – a set of symbolic resources drawn on by CT believers about important dimensions of ontology, epistemology, and human agency. This is due in part to the “access problem”: CT believers are averse to being researched because they often distrust researchers and what they appear to represent. But research on monologicality offers little discussion of the content of monological beliefs and reasoning from the standpoint of the CT believers. Explanations of monologicality invoke a nomothetical or “closed” mindset whereby mutually supporting beliefs based on mistrust of official explanations are used to interpret public events as conspiracies, independent of the facts about those events (which they may ignore or deny). CTs have often been understood to be “monological,” displaying the tendency for belief in one conspiracy theory to be correlated with belief in (many) others.
Belief in CTs is often connected to problematic consequences, such as decreased engagement with conventional political action or even political extremism, so understanding the psychological and social qualities of CT belief is important. 2Institut de Psychologie du Travail et des Organisations, Université de Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, SwitzerlandĬonspiracy theories (CTs) are widespread ways by which people make sense of unsettling or disturbing cultural events.1Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, United Kingdom.Bradley Franks 1*, Adrian Bangerter 2, Martin W.