Page:What Are Conspiracy Theories? A Definitional Approach to Their Correlates, Consequences, and Communication.pdf/19

 conspirators and the time elapsed since the conspiracy started increase (Grimes 2016). Similarly, alleged conspiracies become more malevolent as the degree and scale of harm increase. These constituent parameters can thus be manipulated in an objective, quantitative way. In correlational designs, or even in experiments when less control is possible or desired, we can rely on consensual subjective impressions. For example, participants can be asked to indicate how likely the conspiracy theory is to be false (epistemic risk). The same is true, by the way, of other defining features such as malevolence; for example, participants can be asked to evaluate how harmful (or beneficial) the conspirators’ intended outcome is.

Another advantage of the definitional approach, as we have seen, is that it can help integrate and organize theoretical insights across research domains. The antecedents, consequences, and communication of conspiracy theories are typically studied separately, and theories in psychology seldom pay systematic attention to how they may be related (Pierre 2020). Grounding theories in the essential properties of conspiracy theories helps articulate parallels and synergies between these different facets. For example, more epistemically risky conspiracy beliefs will be more strongly associated with nonrational thinking, will be more stigmatizing to share (Lantian et al. 2018), will be shared relatively more often with epistemically vulnerable audiences (e.g., Sunstein & Vermeule 2009), and will cause adherents to be more open to other epistemically risky ideas (van Prooijen et al. 2018). In this way, conceptualizing the essential properties of conspiracy theories as causal properties provides a high-level theoretical framework that can generate predictions about specific effects and about the correlations between those effects.

The definitional approach can help synthesize insights about the antecedents, consequences, and communication of conspiracy theories by providing a unifying guiding reference for research methodology. The definition can provide conceptual criteria by which to evaluate the operationalization of conspiracy beliefs. For example, scales of conspiracy belief can be developed and tested according to explicit definitional criteria, as can manipulations of conspiracy belief, and coding schemes for verbal data can be obtained from interviews or observational studies. In this way, a degree of conceptual as well as methodological coherence is achieved across research on the causes, consequences, and social transmission of conspiracy theories.

Likewise, a definitional approach helps researchers to thematically organize variables that affect their causes, consequences, and social transmission. Specifically, they can be grouped into categories of variables that hypothetically affect these processes by virtue of their functional relation to one of the defining criteria. For example, factors such as low agreeableness (Swami et al. 2011) may relate to the adoption, sharing, and consequences of conspiracy theories because these beliefs are oppositional. Since conspiracy theories concern malevolent and forbidden acts, they may activate psychological factors including pessimism, anxiety, misanthropy, threat, and intergroup hostility (e.g., Liekefett et al. 2021, Kofta et al. 2020). The agentic nature of conspiracy theories is causally relevant to factors such as intentionality bias (Douglas et al. 2016) and control deprivation (van Prooijen & Acker 2015). Since conspiracy theories are epistemically risky, they bring variables such as nonanalytic thinking (Swami et al. 2014) and bullshit receptivity (van Prooijen et al. 2018) into play. That conspiracy theories are social constructs is a little different insofar as it is an emergent property, and we now return to this specific feature in more detail.

Paying greater attention to the defining features of conspiracy theories can help us understand their potential to construct social realities. The publicness of conspiracy theories is a crucial www.annualreviews.org • Conspiracy Theories289