characteristic that is not explicitly recognized by many psychological accounts of the subject. In the psychological literature, conspiracy theories are typically defined as being merely about events or circumstances that are of public interest in some way. However, they are of public interest in at least two important respects. First, their power to affect people’s well-being, rationality, and social and political behaviors makes them of public interest in and of themselves, as the literature we have reviewed shows (e.g., Douglas & Sutton 2018). Second, conspiracy theories propose new truths and imply that the public should know and accept them. This suggests, in keeping with scholarship in other disciplines, that conspiracy theories can inform public knowledge and shape culture—like, for example, they may have shaped the American culture of individualism and distrust of government (Knight 2003). In the remainder of this section we focus on the capacity of conspiracy theories to construct new social realities.
Underneath the particular claims of each conspiracy theory, there lie important and general constructions. Each conspiracy theory, by definition, suggests a group or community of perpetrators, the directly involved conspirators and those whose interests they serve, versus a community of victims—those who are harmed by the alleged conspiracy. This is not the only moralized distinction constructed by conspiracy theories. They also construct a community of believers in the conspiracy versus the populace who are not aware of it (Popper 1963; see also Nera & Schöpfer 2022). In this way, conspiracy theories construct not only a version of events but also social groups, comprising those of the perpetrators versus their victims and the enlightened versus the ignorant.
An extensive research tradition shows that social identities like these are the basis of shared realities, goals, and actions (Hogg & Rinella 2018). An obvious manifestation of this is the rise of vociferous anti-vaccine, flat-earth, and truther communities, bound together by a strongly epistemic identity and motivated to proselytize (e.g., Wood & Douglas 2013). The agency that conspiracy theories ascribe is crucial here. The harms these theories allege are planned by agents who are assigned a degree of sociopolitical power that they may not possess. Thus, a malevolent, often exaggerated, power is conferred on religious and ethnic minorities and migrant communities, constructing them as a larger-than-life threats and justifying distrust, hostility, exclusion, and even violence (Marchlewska et al. 2019, Nera et al. 2021).
This social construction of reality does not require that sharers of conspiracy theories privately endorse the claims they are making. As we have seen, politicians, activists, and vested industry figures can promote conspiracy theories to protect their own interests, sow doubt, or cultivate a following (Oreskes & Conway 2010; see also the conspiracy entrepreneurs we discussed earlier). In general, the social communication of information does not depend on the faithful copying of concepts in so-called M-L-M-L communication chains (where M stands for the content of communicators’ memory and L for the language they use to transmit the information). Motivated communicators can create new information through a range of strategies ranging from subtle tuning to audience expectations to outright deception (Holtgraves & Kashima 2008). Conspiracy theories have a particularly creative power because they are both public and epistemically risky—by their nature, they deviate from accepted understandings of reality. This makes them appear highly informative, engaging, or even entertaining, and if accepted, they can shift perceptions of reality further than more moderate propositions.
Psychologists have only recently begun to study the communication of conspiracy theories and their power to construct information. Deriving predictions from the defining features of conspiracy theories can help generate and organize research on this new frontier. For example, the agency and malevolence that conspiracy theories ascribe to perpetrator groups suggest that exposure to conspiracy theories causes those groups to be evaluated as more powerful and threatening (see Marchlewska et al. 2019, Nera et al. 2021). In turn, the level of intergroup hostility inspired by conspiracy theories should depend on the magnitude and deliberate malevolence of the alleged
