What’s a good informative essay that describes conspiracy theories like how they were made and how it impacts today’s society, and types of conspiracy theories etc.
Answers
Explanation:
Abstract
In this introduction to the EJSP Special Issue on conspiracy theories as a social psychological phenomenon, we describe how this emerging research domain has developed over the past decade and distill four basic principles that characterize belief in conspiracy theories. Specifically, conspiracy theories are consequential as they have a real impact on people's health, relationships, and safety; they are universal in that belief in them is widespread across times, cultures, and social settings; they are emotional given that negative emotions and not rational deliberations cause conspiracy beliefs; and they are social as conspiracy beliefs are closely associated with psychological motivations underlying intergroup conflict. We then discuss future research and possible policy interventions in this growing area of enquiry.
Keywords: conspiracy theories, consequences, universal, emotions, intergroup conflict
Social media and the Internet are filled with conspiracy theories. These theories range from highly implausible in light of logic or scientific knowledge (e.g., chemtrail conspiracy theories; flat‐earth conspiracy theories) to theoretically possible or even plausible (e.g., allegations that secret service agencies routinely violate privacy laws). In fact, conspiracy theories sometimes turn out to be true (e.g., Watergate; incidents of corporate corruption), although the vast majority of conspiracy theories that citizens have believed throughout history have been false (Pipes, 1997). Conspiracy theories are commonly defined as explanatory beliefs about a group of actors that collude in secret to reach malevolent goals (Bale, 2007). What drives belief in such conspiracy theories? While in earlier decades belief in conspiracy theories often was dismissed as pathological (Hofstadter, 1966), accumulating evidence reveals that conspiracy theories are common among surprisingly large numbers of citizens (Oliver & Wood, 2014; Sunstein & Vermeule, 2009). The potential impact and breadth of conspiracy theories was underscored in 2016, when Donald Trump was elected US President despite propagating a range of highly implausible conspiracy theories throughout his campaign. These theories included allegations that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, that Barack Obama was not born in the US, and that vaccines cause autism. The social sciences have increasingly recognized the importance of understanding conspiracy beliefs, and empirical research on this phenomenon has proliferated in the past decade (for overviews, see Douglas, Sutton, & Cichocka, 2017; Van Prooijen, 2018; Van Prooijen & Van Vugt, in press).
The current Special Issue was designed to showcase the study of belief in conspiracy theories as an emerging research domain within social psychology. In putting this issue together, we specifically aimed to capitalize on the momentum that the scientific study of conspiracy theories is currently having, and to give a second generation of conspiracy theory researchers within our field the opportunity to disseminate their novel findings to a professional audience. To introduce this Special Issue, in the present paper we (i) illuminate how the study of conspiracy theories has developed from an unusual object of study to an increasingly expanding research domain over the past few years, and (ii) distill four basic principles that have emerged from past research, in particular that conspiracy beliefs are consequential, universal, emotional, and social. Each of the contributions to this Special Issue considers at least one of these principles. We conclude by proposing a novel research agenda and policy interventions based on these four principles.