Does It Pay to Spread Conspiracy Theories?
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This post is part two of a two-part series.
The previous post in this series examined the Adaptive Conspiracism Hypothesis (Van Prooijen and Van Vugt, 2018). According to this perspective, the tendency to engage in conspiracy thinking is innate in humans. It also suggests individuals could benefit from spreading conspiracy theories. To test the benefits of spreading conspiracy theories, the researchers in a new investigation recruited subjects via the online platform Prolific to participate in one of several experimental studies.
The studies varied from each other in important ways—including sample sizes, which ranged from 290 to 560—but followed the same basic design. Participants were presented with a scenario, then were asked to rate their perception of the personality traits of an individual (who was sometimes a conspiracy spreader) from it. These traits included the following:
Dominance: perceiving the individual as socially dominant or forceful
Competence: perceiving them as having skill or potential
Warmth: perceiving them as agreeable, helpful, or unselfish
Leader-like qualities: perceiving them as possessing the qualities of leadership, such as the ability to coordinate groups of people
The exact content of the scenario varied for each respondent, so the researchers could compare differences in how they responded to important factors drawn from the Adaptive Conspiracism Hypothesis.
Reputational Consequences of Conspiracy Spreading
The first two studies, one of which was a smaller pilot investigation, aimed to establish baseline comparisons. These examined differences between how people perceive someone who spreads conspiracy theories and someone who doesn’t under otherwise identical conditions. Participants were asked to imagine that they were a member of a tribe living somewhere in the Amazon rainforest. There, they were in competition with another tribe for the area’s natural resources. Several of their tribe’s members have recently been bitten by poisonous snakes and died from it. Moreover, another member of their tribe, named Anu, tells them where they think the snakes came from. For some participants, Anu says that the snakes just moved in by accident and that they should be careful. For the rest of the participants, Anu says the competing group placed the snakes in their territory on purpose to do them harm.
Content retrieved from: https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/strange-journeys/202501/does-it-pay-to-spread-conspiracy-theories.
