New research supports the “rabbit hole” model of conspiratorial thinking
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A new study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology provides evidence that believing in one conspiracy theory can slightly increase the likelihood of believing in others over time. While the effects were small, the findings support a long-standing theory that some people may develop interconnected systems of conspiratorial thinking, where one belief helps reinforce others.
Although previous studies had shown that people who believe in one conspiracy theory tend to believe in others, there was little direct evidence about how these beliefs develop over time. One influential theory, proposed by psychologist Ted Goertzel in 1994, suggested that conspiracy beliefs could form a closed system, where each belief supports and amplifies the others.
This model has been widely cited, but its central claim—that believing in one conspiracy theory increases the likelihood of adopting others—had not been tested in a way that could establish causality. To address this gap, a group of researchers from institutions in New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Germany conducted two extensive longitudinal studies to examine how beliefs in various conspiracy theories influence each other over time.
“There’s been a lot of research showing that people who believe one conspiracy theory are more likely than average to believe other conspiracy theories. A well-known theory suggests this is because developing a belief in one conspiracy theory causes people to develop beliefs in others,” said study author Matt N. Williams, an associate professor at the School of Psychology at Massey University.
“This is the popular idea of ‘going down the rabbit hole.’ But despite a lot of discussion about this idea in the academic literature, there haven’t previously been any studies on the topic with a credible way of testing causal effects. I realized that by doing longitudinal studies it’d be possible to test whether people who develop a belief in one conspiracy theory are more likely to subsequently develop beliefs in other conspiracy theories.”
In the first study, the team followed 498 participants from Australia and New Zealand across seven monthly survey waves. Participants answered questions about their agreement with 10 well-known conspiracy theories, such as beliefs that the September 11 attacks were an inside job, that fluoride is added to water to control minds, and that COVID-19 vaccines contain microchips. Responses were given on a five-point scale ranging from strong disagreement to strong agreement. Most participants disagreed with most of the theories, but there was still enough variation in responses over time to examine patterns of change.
Content retrieved from: https://www.psypost.org/new-research-supports-the-rabbit-hole-model-of-conspiratorial-thinking/.
