not in any case the questions motivating our research nor even psychological questions, we prefer not to insert truth or plausibility as definitional criteria.
Conspiracy Theories Are Social Constructs
As we have seen, each conspiracy theory is at its heart a moral, even political, claim about what the public should believe as opposed to the falsity they have been hoodwinked into accepting. Conspiracy theories are therefore inherently social not only in their content but also in their purpose: They are beliefs that people share in the hope of achieving social goals. These goals may include righting epistemic wrongs, but as we have seen they may be less altruistic. For example, they may serve a communicator’s desire to mobilize hatred of a social group or to portray themselves as a renegade change agent. These motives, not to mention sheer economic profit, are characteristic of “conspiracy entrepreneurs” who generate and spread conspiracy theories for reward (Sunstein & Vermeule 2009). One example is radio show host Alex Jones, who promotes conspiracy theories on his InfoWars website on which he also sells products such as food supplements, toothpaste, and bulletproof vests. Conspiracy theories are inherently social in their origin and distribution: Individuals believe in conspiracy theories because they have been exposed to them in interpersonal or mass communication. Most conspiracy theories are endorsed and discussed by hundreds, thousands, or millions of people, making them shared rather than merely private representations. These theories can be endemic within organized conspiracy communities, taking on the quality of collective representations [Durkheim 2001 (1912)].
All in all, therefore, it is deeply misleading to characterize conspiracy theories merely as beliefs that individuals hold. Any psychological account of conspiracy theories must consider their collective nature. Though this seems a contemporary phenomenon associated with the Internet and social media, there is evidence that conspiracy theories have been prominent in public discourse long before the advent of these new technologies (Uscinski & Parent 2014). Until recently, the communicative aspects of conspiracy theories have been largely ignored in psychological research. As a result, etiological theories of conspiracy belief may overemphasize individual-level factors over communicative and socio-structural determinants (Johnson et al. 2020). Seen in this light, theories that give strong emphasis to the mentalistic or dispositional antecedents of belief in conspiracy theories—a case in point being the conspiracy mentality (e.g., Imhoff & Bruder 2014)—are, despite their other strengths, overly individualistic. Individuals’ belief in conspiracy theories depends on whether and how they and others in their community have been exposed to these ideas, and what alternative narratives and epistemological resources are available to them and their communities (Goertzel 1994, Sunstein & Vermeule 2009).
Overly individualistic theories of conspiracy belief are also misleading in that they encourage us to characterize the societal impact of conspiracy theories as an aggregate of their impacts on individuals—for example, as a function of the number of people who are persuaded to refuse vaccines, decline to vote, or ignore environmental recommendations. In contrast, conspiracy theories have the potential to directly shape societies. True or not, they concern matters of interest to almost everyone and are immensely communicable. They propose alternative, risky, rather innovative understandings of reality. In so doing they identify—or rather construct—communities of interest. These communities include the perpetrators and the victims of conspiracies as well as distinct epistemic communities, such as those who embrace the conspiracy theory and those who are in the thrall of the falsehood that it opposes. Thus, conspiracy theories contain the seeds of important social categories, which in turn can provide the basis of shared identities, realities, goals, and actions. They do not refer only to individuals but also to communities and can motivate and direct, as we shall see, collective sensemaking and collective action. Thus they do not merely represent social realities but have the potential to create them.
