The appearance of a monological belief system is a twofold artifact. An alternative perspective maintains that conspiracy theorists are a psychologically heterogenous group. Yet it remains unclear the degree to which it adequately characterizes the bulk of conspiracy endorsers. The monological view certainly captures something important about the popular conception of conspiracy theorists. So for example researchers ask “who tends to believe, and why” (Leman, 2007, 36), or inquire into the “psychological origin” of conspiracy theories (Swami et al., 2014, 573), or discuss the “similar underlying psychological processes” that are common to conspiracy believers (Van Prooijen et al., 2015, 2). Then, through engagement with other ideas and through socialization with other conspiracy theorists, a particular mindset or worldview develops in which all historical and contemporary events can be explained in terms of hidden conspiracies.Īs this is not a typical reaction to encountering conspiracy theories, monological theories typically attempt to ground the tendency toward a monological belief system in differences in personality traits, aberrant psychological processes, or other cognitive factors. According to the monological account, individuals may begin with a particular instance of conspiratorial thinking. One key line of research has characterized conspiracy believers as favoring a “monological” belief system (Goertzel, 1994 Swami et al., 2011 van der Linden, 2015), in which every event is connected to every other event. Conspiracy endorsers are said to be driven by feelings of powerlessness and lack of control (Whitson and Galinsky, 2008) to crave explanation in a fundamentally confusing world (Keeley, 1999) to be motivated by background political beliefs (Kahan, 2015) to seek social individuation (Raab et al., 2013) or to be misled by the “echo chambers” of online opinion (Bessi et al., 2015 Del Vicario et al., 2016). Numerous psychological accounts purport to explain the attraction of conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories are not socially innocuous: aside from obvious political effects, endorsement of conspiracy theories is associated with rejection of science and unwillingness to donate to prosocial causes (van der Linden, 2015). The open discussion promoted by these forums forms a key mechanism for the spread of misinformation, including false conspiracy theories (Dunn et al., 2015 Zhou et al., 2015 Del Vicario et al., 2016). The role of conspiracy theorizing has been intensified by a move to online discussion forums. Indeed, conspiracy theorizing has long been a part of American politics (Hofstadter, 1964). Considering recent political discourse, this seems optimistic. Instead, we suggest, those who endorse conspiracies seem to be primarily brought together by epistemological concerns, and that these central concerns link an otherwise heterogenous group of individuals.Īlexis de Tocqueville wrote that the American commitment to freedom of association prevented the formation of conspiracies (de Tocqueville, 1831). Neither simple irrationality nor common preoccupations can account for the observed diversity. We argue that traditional “monological” believers are only the tip of an iceberg of commenters. The diversity of the distinct subgroups places constraints on theories of what generates conspiracy theorizing. Further, we argue, these differences are interpretable as differences in background beliefs and motivations. We show that within the forum, there are multiple sub-populations distinguishable by their loadings on different topics in the model. This subreddit provides a large corpus of comments which spans many years and numerous authors. We describe a unique approach to studying online conspiracy theorists which used non-negative matrix factorization to create a topic model of authors' contributions to the main conspiracy forum on. Yet this online activity can be difficult to quantify and study. Online forums provide a valuable window into everyday conspiracy theorizing, and can give a clue to the motivations and interests of those who post in such forums. Conspiracy theories play a troubling role in political discourse.
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