Conspiracy Theories Ascribe Agency to Individuals and Groups
Conspiracy theories entail that a small group of conspirators has been able to achieve outcomes that are so big and important that the public need to know about them. Thus, believing in conspiracy theories means believing that individuals and small groups have this level of capability. For Popper (1963), this belief that societal events are shaped by a few coordinated actors rather than impersonal and systematic factors is the key to all conspiracy theories. For our purposes, this feature follows logically from our working definition of conspiracy and conspiracy theory.
The ascription of agency has at least two important social-psychological consequences. First, conspiracy theories can exaggerate the capabilities of individuals and groups. Researchers often assume that the power ascribed by conspiracy theories is objectively warranted—as they concern alleged plots by powerful actors (e.g., Bruder et al. 2013, Imhoff & Bruder 2014, Uscinski 2018). This power, however, though it is necessarily ascribed to the actors who are accused by conspiracy theories, is not necessarily held by them in reality. In fact, many conspiracy theories target powerless groups or individuals, such as displaced people from Syria, Afghanistan, and other Muslim-majority countries (Nera et al. 2021). Others assign implausible levels of geo-political and even metaphysical control to numerically small minority groups such as the Jewish people (Kofta et al. 2020) and ascribe fantastical powers to gender and women’s rights activists (Marchlewska et al. 2019). This highlights the creative power of conspiracy theories to not just interpret social realities but also envisage alternative realities. Further, since prejudice, discrimination, and intergroup violence are motivated by perceived threats from social outgroups, the ability of conspiracy theories to ascribe power suggests a mechanism by which belief in, or even exposure to, these theories can worsen intergroup relations (Bilewicz et al. 2013, Jolley et al. 2020).
A second consequence of conspiracy theories’ ascription of agency to individuals and groups is that they may divert attention away from the inherent design flaws or systemic problems of a society. In turn, this implies that believing in conspiracy theories may not conflict with being satisfied with current social arrangements. For example, there is evidence that conspiracy beliefs and satisfaction with the social status quo increase together in response to threats (Jutzi et al. 2020) and that conspiracy theories may actually bolster satisfaction with social systems whose legitimacy is called into question—principally by blaming their problems on a few bad apples who ruin things with their plots and schemes (Jolley et al. 2018, Mao et al. 2021).
The agency ascribed by conspiracy theories is of a particular kind. Since the actors have to coordinate in secret toward a shared goal, it follows that their actions are intentional and purposive (e.g., Basham 2003). This implies that conspiracies do not happen by accident, and this definitional criterion assumes that conspiracies are not simply the result of impersonal or unconscious processes. This helps us to understand why the intentionality bias—the tendency to perceive agency and intentionality where it is unlikely to exist—predicts the extent to which people endorse conspiracy theories (e.g., Douglas et al. 2016) and how conspiracy belief is associated with teleological thinking—the attribution of purpose and a final cause to natural events and entities (Wagner-Egger et al. 2018).
Conspiracy Theories Are Epistemically Risky
The core features of conspiracy theories make them epistemically risky—that is, inherently prone to being false, compared to beliefs that lack these features. Recall that the alleged plot at the core of any conspiracy theory occurs in secret, protected from public scrutiny. Thus, by definition, there is normally less of an evidential trace of this coordinated action than there would be for (say) the minuted decisions of a public committee meeting. Grimes (2016) has shown that this normative disadvantage of conspiracy theories gets more pronounced as the number of alleged conspirators,
