conspiracy. Exposure to conspiracy theories that allege harm to an ingroup should increase identification, and especially insecure forms of identification, with that group (see Cichocka et al. 2016).
CONCLUDING REMARKS
In recent years, conspiracy theories have become an important topic of research in psychological science. Research has yielded important advances in our understanding of the correlates, consequences, and communication of conspiracy belief. In this article, we reviewed this literature and argued that further theoretical and empirical advances are made possible by focusing more attention on the essential features of conspiracy theories and on their causal and explanatory power. We have proposed an inventory of those features grounded in an explicit and reasoned definition of conspiracy theories. Some aspects of our characterization are certainly disputable and differ from other definitions (e.g., Imhoff & Bruder 2014, Nera & Schöpfer 2022, Wagner-Egger & Bangerter 2007). Nevertheless, having a reasoned and explicit definition of the essential properties of conspiracy theories can move research and theory forward. We have illustrated how a new framework about the generation and organization of research insights grounded in this definition can move the literature forward. Specifically, it can facilitate research progress by guiding research methodology. It can help generate new and important hypotheses about what makes conspiracy theories different from other phenomena. It allows us to examine the role of essential features of conspiracy theories in determining why people adopt them, why they share them, and how they influence people’s attitudes and behaviors.
Our analysis also calls attention to the inherently social and creative nature of conspiracy theories. It may help explain why, for example, political figures use conspiracy theories about religious, ethnic, political, or national outgroups to try to stoke fears and galvanize ingroup support, why these conspiracy theories heighten prejudice and threat perceptions, and why they resonate with people who already feel chronically threatened and powerless.
These are crucial questions in the turbulent times of the twenty-first century, because conspiracy theories not only reflect but also shape our times. In our previous work (Douglas et al. 2017) we have argued that conspiracy theories may promise to address the troubles and frustrations in the lives of individuals but ultimately fail to do so. The analysis of conspiracy theories we have advanced in this article suggests that something analogous may be said about the collective. Conspiracy theories have a creative, world-making potential, and if anything may make the world in their own image—a world in which trust and benevolence are in short supply, evidence cannot be trusted, social groups have few interests in common, and power is concentrated in the hands of a few. Left unchecked and unchallenged, conspiracy theories threaten to become self-fulfilling prophecies.
SUMMARY POINTS
- We review the empirical psychological literature on the antecedents, consequences, and communication of conspiracy theories, highlighting the abundance of research but also its disorganization.
- We propose a definition of conspiracy theories based on some of their inherent characteristics.
- In our definition, we focus on the key defining feature of publicness, in that conspiracy theories concern events and phenomena that the public do not (but should) know about.
