Conspiracy Narratives in contemporary society

Being promoted by best-selling books, the mass media and online posts, the conspiracy theories about GMOs (genetically-modified organisms) have been widely accepted by the Chinese populace and have won tremendous support from both political camps: the rightist and the leftist groups in post-socialist China. These conspiracy theories either accuse the U.S. state of having manipulated GM (genetically-modified) projects to initiate financial and political wars against China, or the Chinese policymakers and scientists of having betrayed Chinese commoners to global privileged groups. Why do people believe in conspiracy theories rather than the guarantees of authorities and scientists who are supposed experts in genetic engineering? In this paper, I will refute the common belief that conspiracy theories are rooted in scientific ignorance, the lack of transparency in policy-making and irrationality, and argue that conspiracy theories have never and will not go away with modernization. Instead, like the revival of witch belief in post-colonial Africa, they are concomitants of modernization. As a modern version of dystopian narrative, conspiracy theory is actually employed by those who are experiencing ＂agency panic＂ (Melley 2000) to make themselves heard.

Conspiracy Theories in the United States and the Middle East is the first book to approach conspiracy theorizing from a decidedly comparative and interdisciplinary perspective. Whereas previous studies have engaged with conspiracy theories within national frameworks only, this collection of essays draws attention to the fact that conspiracist visions are transnational narratives that travel between and connect different cultures. It focuses on the United States and the Middle East because these two regions of the world are entangled in manifold ways and conspiracy theories are currently extremely prominent in both. The contributors to the volume are scholars of Middle Eastern Studies, Anthropology, History, Political Science, Cultural Studies, and American Studies, who approach the subject from a variety of different theories and methodologies. However, all of them share the fundamental assumption that conspiracy theories must not be dismissed out of hand or ridiculed. Usually wrong and frequently dangerous, they are nevertheless articulations of and distorted responses to needs and anxieties that must be taken seriously. Focusing on individual case studies and displaying a high sensitivity for local conditions and the cultural environment, the essays offer a nuanced image of the workings of conspiracy theories in the United States and the Middle East.

Pandemics, Power, and Conspiracy Theories

How Google Autocomplete Algorithms about Conspiracy Theorists Mislead the Public

Although the term conspiracy theory does not appear in my Conspiracy Nar ratives in Roman History, one reviewer remarked, It was hard not to misre member Pagan's title as 'Conspiracy Theories in Ancient Rome.' l Given the preponderance of conspiracies in ancient Rome, conspiracy theory is a reason able expectation; however, so self-evident is the impact of conspiracy on the political life of the Romans that they scarcely engaged in a discourse of con spiracy theory that was not embedded in some response to a specific political crisis. As a modern sociological phenomenon, conspiracy theory was not part of the vocabulary of the ancient Romans; they did not attempt a formal defini tion. Conspiracy demanded action, not theory. Therefore the study of con spiracy theory in ancient Rome demands its own methods?and yields its own results. In this essay I build a model of conspiracy theory based on a wide array of ancient sources and suggest some of the consequences that conspiracy theory had for Roman society. In the absence of a term for conspiracy theory in Latin or Greek, I adopt a sociohistorical approach that moves beyond isolated political events as narrated by individual historians so that I can illustrate how conspiracy forms a substantial part of the Roman mind-set, as evidenced in a variety of

Practical recommendations to communicate with patients about health‐related conspiracy theories

The shaping of a politician's image may be considered in terms of various research aspects. The purpose of this article is to draw attention to the issue of the use of communication strategies from the fields of PR and political marketing in the context of building a negative message, using the following mechanisms: anomie, conspiracy theory - political paranoia and political lies. From a psychological point of view, anomie can mean "a dearth of sense, a dearth of meaning". The cause of this phenomenon is always sought for outside ourselves, in states of confusion and disorientation, when we want to find those guilty of an event/socio-political situation. These treatments are frequently combined with the building of a "conspiracy theory". They appear at specific moments in history, or in specific socio-political formations. They may relate to the collective mentality (operating on the principle of legends or myths). In the analysed context, they are states of consciousness of an individual who also performs important public and political functions. Their use in a political creation consists primarily of finding, for oneself and others, the existence of a collective enemy and fighting it. The result of this approach is\nthe creation of the phenomenon of "political paranoia" as a particular way of thinking about politics. Another element of this puzzle is the articulation by politicians of a political lie. This phenomenon (according to definition) occurs when someone utters a claim that s/he knows or suspects is false, in the hope that others will consider it to be true. Lying is an action deliberately aimed to deceive the target audience. When we add to these phenomena colouring, free juggling of data, numbers, sentences, examples and concealing, and hiding information that could strengthen or weaken someone's position, we obtain the full suite of tools used in creating the media image of a politician, party, or politics in the broad sense. The phenomena analysed constitute an important contribution to research on the problem of mediatisation (medialisation) of social life, culture, and politics.

Rage against the machine: investigating conspiracy theories about the video assistant referee on Twitter during the 2018 FIFA World Cup

Learning from Experience?COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories and Their Implications for Democratic Discourse Jennifer Hochschild (bio) and David Beavers (bio) in a survey fielded on march 7, 2020, more than three times as many Democrats as Republicans (61 percent and 20 percent, respectively) agreed that the United States was concealing the true scale of SARS-CoV-2 deaths. Republicans were nearly 20 percentage points more likely than Democrats (57 percent and 38 percent, respectively) to agree that the coronavirus is a man-made epidemic. With fewer than 300 confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United States (CDC 2020), pandemic beliefs with no clear basis in fact were already flourishing and were already colored by Americans' partisan lenses. This case points to large questions. Although research shows that "basically all Americans hold conspiracy beliefs" (Smallpage et al. 2020, 264), we do not know enough about adherence to these beliefs and consequences for American politics. The very concept is contested—one person's plausible hypothesis or praise for imaginative thinking is another's conspiracy theory. But at least for those who see conspiracy theories as a threat to democratic governance, definitions share a few features. Karen Douglas and coauthors define [End Page 859] them as "attempts to explain the ultimate causes of significant social and political events and circumstances with claims of secret plots by two or more powerful actors" (Douglas et al. 2019, 4). Joseph Uscinski and his colleagues, who are among the most influential political scientists writing on this topic, similarly define a conspiracy theory as "a proposed explanation of events that cites as a main causal factor a small group of persons (the conspirators) acting in secret for their own benefit, against the common good" (Uscinski, Klofstad, and Atkinson 2016, 58). Such theories are not new to American politics. Richard Hofstadter set their pejorative framework by "borrowing a clinical term for other purposes" in describing conspiracism as a mental illness ([1964] 2008, 3). Although some argue that conspiracy theories should be analyzed neutrally or even favorably in some circumstances (Butter and Knight 2020a), most analysts of democracy agree with Hofstadter in fearing and condemning them. They worry that conspiracy theories are gaining importance in our era of partisan polarization, hyperpartisan media, disdain for norms of civility and facticity among some political elites, and digital networks' capacity to create "a global network of village idiots" (Lenny Pozner, in Kolbert 2019). Adherence to conspiracy theories might even be deadly. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, exposure to misinformation was associated with increased cases and deaths, most likely by discouraging individuals from wearing masks, socially distancing, and minimizing travel (Ash et al. 2020; Bursztyn et al. 2020). By March 2022, Americans over age 12 who were not vaccinated, sometimes due to acceptance of theories about vaccines' harms to one's body, were 17 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than were those who had received primary vaccines and a booster dose (CDC 2022). Coronavirus-related conspiracy narratives may also undermine democratic discourse and practice. Furious encounters between people with opposing views on COVID-19 are commonplace on- and offline. Patients and their families who deny the disease's existence have spit on and threatened medical staff, and some public health [End Page 860] experts feel under threat (McKay et al. 2020). Belief in a connection between COVID-19 and 5G telecommunications technology was positively associated with state anger and greater justification for violence now or perhaps in the future (Jolley and Paterson 2020). More generally, as one scholar summarizes, "conspiracy theories … have been linked to climate denial, vaccine refusal, political apathy, apathy in the workplace, prejudice, crime, and violence. … Conspiracy theories about COVID-19 are no exception" (Douglas 2021, 271). Despite the fact that some beliefs arguably endanger public health, democratic polities must be cautious about restraining conspiracy narratives. Commitments to freedom of speech and assembly, along with protections for privacy, civil liberty, and freedom from surveillance, make it difficult to balance the need for effective governance and public safety against the imperative of individual freedom. And disagreement about how to attempt the balance itself adds another layer of challenge to democracy. In the survey that we describe and analyze...

From COVID-19 Treatment to Miracle Cure

I criticise Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule’s influential critique of conspiracy theories in "Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures". I argue that their position depends on an equivocation over the meaning of the term ‘conspiracy theory’. This equivocation reflects a widespread assumption that conspiracy theories tend to be false, unjustified and harmful, and that, as a result, we can speak as if all conspiracy theories are objectionable in each of these three ways. I argue that this assumption is itself false, unjustified, and harmful. There are many true, justified, and/or beneficial conspiracy theories. This is because people often conspire, we often have good reason to believe that people are conspiring, and there is often a significant public benefit in exposing their conspiracies. I compare conspiracy theories to scientific theories, arguing that just as most of us regard bad scientific theories (i.e. false, unjustified and harmful ones) as an acceptable price to pay for good scientific theories, we should regard bad conspiracy theories as an acceptable price to pay for good conspiracy theories. I go on to argue that Sunstein and Vermeule’s proposed ‘cure’ for conspiracy theories is unlikely to work and is inconsistent with the values of liberal democracy.

Recent studies on conspiracy theories employ standardized questionnaires, thus neglecting their narrative qualities by reducing them to mere statements. Recipients are considered as consumers only. Two empirical studies—a conventional survey (n = 63) and a study using the method of narrative construction (n = 30)—which were recently conducted by the authors of this paper—suggest that the truth about conspiracy theories is more complex. Given a set of statements about a dramatic historic event (in our case 9/11) that includes official testimonies, allegations to a conspiracy and extremely conspiratorial statements, the majority of participants created a narrative of 9/11 they deemed plausible that might be considered a conspiracy theory. The resulting 30 idiosyncratic stories imply that no clear distinction between official story and conspiratorial narrative is possible any more when the common approach of questionnaires is abandoned. Based on these findings, we present a new theoretical and methodological approach which acknowledges conspiracy theories as a means of constructing and communicating a set of personal values. While broadening the view upon such theories, we stay compatible with other approaches that have focused on extreme theory types. In our view, accepting conspiracy theories as a common, regulative and possibly benign phenomenon, we will be better able to understand why some people cling to immunized, racist and off-wall stories—and others do not.

#FreeBritney and the Pleasures of Conspiracy

Conspiracy

Conspiracy theories are widespread and have a profound impact on society. The present contribution proposes that conspiracy theories are explanatory narratives that necessarily contain justice judgments, as they include attributions of blame and accusations of unethical or criminal conduct. Conspiratorial narratives also are mental simulations, however, and may elicit genuine feelings of injustice also without evidence of actual malpractice. Indeed, conspiracy theories sometimes describe unfair events that are unlikely to have occurred, unethical authorities that might not actually exist, and so on. Here I propose two complementary processes that stimulate belief in evidence-free conspiracy theories: (1) Existential threats instigate biased mental processing and motivated reasoning, that jointly promote an alternative perception of reality; and (2) group allegiances shape how people perceive, interpret, and remember facts to highlight the immoral qualities of competing outgroups. Due to these processes, conspiracy theories elicit a set of distinct reactions such as poor health choices and rejection of science. Moreover, evidence-free conspiracy theories require interventions beyond traditional approaches to install justice principles, such as debunking falsehoods and reducing polarized intergroup distinctions. I conclude that the scientific study of conspiracy theories is part of, and has a unique place in, social justice research.