The conspiracy theorist 'worldview' and the language of their argument
Oct 2022, phys.org
Conspiracies rely on other conspiracies as "evidence," jumping around different topics, less coherently than mainstream texts, but relying on a web of interconnected ideas to connect the dots.The team analyzed thousands of conspiracist and mainstream webpages using natural language processing, a type of computer analysis of human language. They compared mainstream and conspiracist writing on the same topics.
Image credit: Network interconnectedness - conspiracy vs non-conspiracy - Alessandro Miani et al Science Advances 2022. https://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abq3668
The synergistic network effect:
- Believing that the AIDS virus was deliberately engineered in a government laboratory is associated with believing that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was involved in Martin Luther King’s assassination [16].
- Conspiracy believers tend to identify meaningful relationships among randomly co-occurring events [17, 18]
- “...the specifics of a conspiracy theory do not matter as much as the fact that it is a conspiracy theory at all” (p. 5, ft. 15, 21).
Thus, belief in multiple conspiracies may be self-supporting: The interconnectivity among conspiracy beliefs is supported by a meta-belief that resolves the apparent contradictions at the lower level. Hence, conspiracy theories may thus constitute a mutually reinforcing network of beliefs, creating self-sustaining evidence for a world dominated by deceptive agents (15).
(The meta-belief they're talking about is this -- authorities are intentionally deceptive, e.g., they're lying to us.)
- Hypothesis 1: If a conspiracy worldview coerces unconnected observations to support for an overarching belief in the deceptive nature of authorities, then a network of potential conspiracy-related topics will be more tightly interconnected in conspiracy documents than in nonconspiracy documents.
- Hypothesis 2a: If conspiracy narratives focus less on individual topics than nonconspiracy narratives, then topic specificity will be lower for conspiracy than nonconspiracy documents.
- Hypothesis 2b: Text cohesion between paragraphs should be less internally cohesive for conspiracy documents than nonconspiracy documents.
- Hypothesis 3: If conspiracy narratives reference similar worldviews, then similarity between documents should be higher for conspiracy documents (as a group) than nonconspiracy documents (H3).
15. M. J. Wood, K. M. Douglas, R. M. Sutton, Dead and alive. Soc. Psychol. Personal. Sci. 3, 767–773 (2012).16. T. Goertzel, Belief in conspiracy theories. Polit. Psychol. 15, 731 (1994).17.R. C. van der Wal, R. M. Sutton, J. Lange, J. P. N. Braga, Suspicious binds: Conspiracy thinking and tenuous perceptions of causal connections between co-occurring and spuriously correlated events. Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 48, 970–989 (2018).; J.-W. van Prooijen, K. M. Douglas, C. De Inocencio, Connecting the dots: Illusory pattern perception predicts belief in conspiracies and the supernatural. Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 48, 320–335 (2018).18. J.-W. van Prooijen, K. M. Douglas, C. De Inocencio, Connecting the dots: Illusory pattern perception predicts belief in conspiracies and the supernatural. Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 48, 320–335 (2018).21. S. Lewandowsky, J. Cook, E. Lloyd, The ‘Alice in Wonderland’ mechanics of the rejection of (climate) science: Simulating coherence by conspiracism. Synthese 195, 175–196 (2018).
via University of Warwick and University of Neuchatel, Switzerland: Alessandro Miani et al, Interconnectedness and (in)coherence as a signature of conspiracy worldviews, Science Advances (2022). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abq3668
Post Script:
Language of Conspiracy (LOCO) - 88 million–word corpus composed of topic-matched conspiracy (N = 23,937) and nonconspiracy (N = 72,806) text documents (i.e., webpages) harvested from 150 websites.
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