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Is Belief in Conspiracy Theories Pathological? A Survey Experiment on the Cognitive Roots of Extreme Suspicion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 April 2015

Scott Radnitz  and
Patrick Underwood
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Abstract

What are the origins of belief in conspiracy theories? The dominant approach to studying conspiracy theories links belief to social stresses or personality type, and does not take into account the situational and fluctuating nature of attitudes. In this study, a survey experiment, subjects are presented with a mock news article designed to induce conspiracy belief. Subjects are randomly assigned three manipulations hypothesized to heighten conspiracy perceptions: a prime to induce anxiety; information about the putative conspirator; and the number and identifiability of the victim(s). The results indicate that conspiratorial perceptions can emerge from both situational triggers and subtle contextual variables. Conspiracy beliefs emerge as ordinary people make judgments about the social and political world.

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Articles
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British Journal of Political Science , Volume 47 , Issue 1 , January 2017 , pp. 113 - 129
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington, Seattle (email: [email protected]); Department of Sociology, University of Washington, Seattle (email: [email protected]). This project was supported by Time-Sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences. The authors are grateful to Penny Visser, Jeremy Freese, and Knowledge Networks for their assistance in fielding the survey. They would also like to thank Danny Hayes, Jeremy Teigen, Jerry Herting, Christopher Parker, Katy Pearce, Brian Lee, and John Payne for useful feedback. An earlier version of this article was presented at the American Political Science Association annual meeting in 2011. Data replication sets and online appendices are available at http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1017/S0007123414000556

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