Interconnectedness and (in)coherence As a Signature of Conspiracy Worldviews

Overview

Journal Sci Adv

Specialties Biology
Science

Date 2022 Oct 26

PMID 36288312

Authors

Alessandro Miani

Thomas Hills

Adrian Bangerter

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Conspiracy theories may arise out of an overarching conspiracy worldview that identifies common elements of subterfuge across unrelated or even contradictory explanations, leading to networks of self-reinforcing beliefs. We test this conjecture by analyzing a large natural language database of conspiracy and nonconspiracy texts for the same events, thus linking theory-driven psychological research with data-driven computational approaches. We find that, relative to nonconspiracy texts, conspiracy texts are more interconnected, more topically heterogeneous, and more similar to one another, revealing lower cohesion within texts but higher cohesion between texts and providing strong empirical support for an overarching conspiracy worldview. Our results provide inroads for classification algorithms and further exploration into individual differences in belief structures.

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