Page:What Are Conspiracy Theories? A Definitional Approach to Their Correlates, Consequences, and Communication.pdf/3

 terrorism, prejudice, poor health choices, and denial of climate change. In many important ways, therefore, conspiracy theories matter.

Progress in the study of this important topic has been spectacular. We have prepared this article to review this progress, highlighting what we know, and what we are yet to learn, about the psychology of conspiracy theories. Moving beyond the boundaries of a descriptive review, we argue that significantly more progress will be achieved if we pay more careful attention to determining exactly what we are studying. We argue therefore for analyzing the essential features of conspiracy theories and their implications for the causes, consequences, and transmission of conspiracy beliefs.

We begin by reviewing the empirical literature on conspiracy theories, highlighting both the abundance and the disorganization of empirical discoveries in this literature. We then take a step back to propose a reasoned definition of conspiracy theories. From this, we derive an inventory of some of their most important inherent characteristics. We then articulate a metatheoretical framework in which hypotheses about the acceptance, sharing, and impacts of conspiracy theories can be inferred from these defining characteristics. We argue that this framework synthesizes hitherto disconnected insights into the antecedents, transmission, and consequences of conspiracy belief, and it promises to promote and direct innovation in further research.

The question of why people believe in conspiracy theories started to attract empirical attention in the 1990s (Abalakina-Paap et al. 1999, Butler et al. 1995, Goertzel 1994, McHoskey 1995). Belief in conspiracy theories—like many other psychological constructs—was and is typically measured using self-report scales. In such scales, participants are asked to rate their disagreement/agreement on a Likert-type scale with each of several specific (e.g., “The attack on the Twin Towers was not a terrorist action but a governmental conspiracy”; see Douglas et al. 2016) or general (e.g., “The power held by heads of state is second to that of small unknown groups who really control world politics”; see Brotherton et al. 2013) statements. Typically, these scales are internally consistent. This indicates that conspiracy beliefs tend to correlate with each other. It also allows researchers to take the mean score as an index of participants’ tendency to believe in conspiracy statements and to observe correlations with predictors such as paranoia, magical thinking, mistrust, and feelings of powerlessness (Abalakina-Paap et al. 1999, Butler et al. 1995, Goertzel 1994, McHoskey 1995).

The increasing interest in the psychology of conspiracy theories has yielded such a volume of research that in recent years, researchers have been able to meta-analyze studies (e.g., Biddlestone et al. 2022) and synthesize their findings. In one such synthesis, Douglas et al. (2017) proposed that people believe in conspiracy theories when three important types of psychological motives are not being met. The first of these are epistemic motives to achieve knowledge and certainty. Factors such as a tendency to look for agency, patterns, and meaning where none exist (Douglas et al. 2016, van der Wal et al. 2018, van Prooijen et al. 2018); paranormal beliefs (Darwin et al. 2011); chronic feelings of uncertainty (van Prooijen & Jostmann 2013); lower analytic thinking (Swami et al. 2014); the conjunction fallacy (Brotherton & French 2014); teleological bias (Wagner-Egger et al. 2018); illusory correlation perceptions (van der Wal et al. 2018); and higher need for cognitive closure (Marchlewska et al. 2018) all appear to be associated with greater belief in conspiracy theories. These findings suggest that in an effort to make sense of important political and social events, people turn to conspiracy theories when their epistemic motives are challenged by information that feels too much, too little, incomplete, contradictory, or ambiguous.

The second set of motives proposed by Douglas et al. (2017) are existential motives, including the motives to feel safe and in control. When these motives are not met, conspiracy theories may seem appealing as a way to compensate. Consistent with this reasoning, conspiracy beliefs www.annualreviews.org • Conspiracy Theories273