Understanding Conspiracy Theories

By Karen M. Douglas, J. Uscinski, Robbie M. Sutton, A. Cichocka, T. Nefes, Chee Siang Ang, Farzin Deravi. Political Psychology, 2019

1,169 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Scholarly efforts to understand conspiracy theories have grown significantly in recent years, and there is now a broad and interdisciplinary literature that we review in this article. We ask three specific questions. First, what are the factors that are associated with conspiracy theorizing? Our review of the literature shows that conspiracy beliefs result from a range of psychological, political and social factors. Next, how are conspiracy theories communicated? Here, we explain how conspiracy theories are shared among individuals and spread through traditional and social media platforms. Next, what are the risks and rewards associated with conspiracy theories? By focusing on politics and science, we argue that conspiracy theories do more harm than good. Finally, because this is a growing literature and many open questions remain, we conclude by suggesting several promising avenues for future research.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c467bee1ea4463a4c2c6a4ff0f422cd861ba3c31

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Citations in the corpus

Conspiracy Beliefs and Violent Extremist Intentions: The Contingent Effects of Self-efficacy, Self-control and Law-related Morality (2020, background): “individuals are entrenched within such communities, they may become more polarized and adopt more extreme beliefs and attitudes.(6) Research highlights the important function of alternative media platforms in fostering polarized online communities where conspiracy theories may facilitate and catalyz”
Conspiracy theories as barriers to controlling the spread of COVID-19 in the U.S. (2020, background): “Complicating matters further, belief in conspiracy theories that attributed a socially significant event, in this case the novel coronavirus, to unknown and sinister actors (Douglas et al., 2019), were circulating within social and traditional media (Funke, 2020; Infotagion, 2020; Lee, 2020).”
Fake news, disinformation and misinformation in social media: a review (2023, background): “Conspiracy belief refers to people’s adoption and belief of conspiracy theories, and it is associated with psychological, political and social factors (Douglas et al. 2019).”
COVID-19–Related Infodemic and Its Impact on Public Health: A Global Social Media Analysis (2020, background): “defined as explanatory beliefs about an individual or group of people working in secret to reaching malicious goals.(16) Data extraction and consistency.”
Defining Misinformation and Understanding its Bounded Nature: Using Expertise and Evidence for Describing Misinformation (2020, background): “…reward those who believe something in the absence (or in contradiction to) the best available evidence; to do so is to reward a conspiracy ideation rooted in skepticism of official accounts or belief that secret groups are plotting against the public (Douglas et al., 2019; Swami et al., 2017).”