Search for: All records

Abstract A moral panic animated by conspiracy theories alleging ritual sex abuse swept through the United States in the 1980s. During that “Satanic Panic,” as it came to be known, people expressed fears of social change regarding gender and sexuality. Beginning in 2022, conservative politicians, pundits, and pastors in the United States levied similar accusations of child grooming, sex trafficking, and satanic sex abuse at the LGBTQ + community, teachers, liberals, and entertainment companies; these accusations were accompanied by repressive legislation and violence. Despite their political salience, little is known about the people who believe these accusations. Using a 2022 U.S. national survey (N = 2,001), we find that up to one-third of Americans believe accusations of satanic cult abuse, government sex trafficking, and an “agenda” to “groom” children into gay or trans lifestyles. These beliefs are correlated with a range of political attitudes (e.g., positive views of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and white nationalists) and policy preferences (e.g., overturning Roe v. Wade), as well as with normative (e.g., a desire to run for political office) and nonnormative (e.g., the acceptance of political violence) political intentions and behaviors. Regression analysis further reveals that these conspiracy theory beliefs are positively associated with dark psychological traits, antiestablishment orientations, and repressive views toward sex and gender. Our findings suggest that these accusations can spark dehumanization and deadly violence by mobilizing into politics people who possess strong feelings of political efficacy, but also antisocial traits, nonnormative tendencies, and a desire to undermine established political institutions. 

The “White Replacement” conspiracy theory, that governments and corporations are “replacing” white people, is linked to several mass shootings. Given its recent ubiquity in elite rhetoric, concerns have arisen about the popularity of this conspiracy theory among the United States mass public. Further, political scientists have noted a need to understand why people believe or act upon this conspiracy theory. Using a 2022 US national survey (n = 2001), we find that a third of Americans agree that leaders are replacing white people with people of color. These beliefs are related to anti-social personality traits, various forms of nationalist and authoritarian sentiments, and negative sentiments toward immigrants, minorities, women, and the political establishment. Regression analysis however fails to find significant effects of partisanship and ideology on these beliefs. Further, we observed that these beliefs are related to a desire to engage in both normative (e.g., run for political office) and nonnormative political participation (e.g., commit violence). Given the popularity of White Replacement conspiracy theories in the US and elsewhere, our findings suggest new avenues for research into potentially dangerous beliefs, as well as xenophobia, antisemitism, racism, sexism, extremism, and political violence. 

Conspiracy theories have found a new channel on the internet and spread by bringing together like-minded people, thus functioning as an echo chamber. The new 88-million word corpus \textit{Language of Conspiracy} (LOCO) was created with the intention to provide a text collection to study how the language of conspiracy differs from mainstream language. We use this corpus to develop a robust annotation scheme that will allow us to distinguish between documents containing conspiracy language and documents that do not contain any conspiracy content or that propagate conspiracy theories via misinformation (which we explicitly disregard in our work). We find that focusing on indicators of a belief in a conspiracy combined with textual cues of conspiracy language allows us to reach a substantial agreement (based on Fleiss{'} kappa and Krippendorff{'}s alpha). We also find that the automatic retrieval methods used to collect the corpus work well in finding mainstream documents, but include some documents in the conspiracy category that would not belong there based on our definition. 

Conspiracy theories have found a new channel on the internet and spread by bringing together like-minded people, thus functioning as an echo chamber. The new 88-million word corpus Language of Conspiracy (LOCO) was created with the intention to provide a text collection to study how the language of conspiracy differs from mainstream language. We use this corpus to develop a robust annotation scheme that will allow us to distinguish between documents containing conspiracy language and documents that do not contain any conspiracy content or that propagate conspiracy theories via misinformation (which we explicitly disregard in our work). We find that focusing on indicators of a belief in a conspiracy combined with textual cues of conspiracy language allows us to reach a substantial agreement (based on Fleiss’ kappa and Krippendorff’s alpha). We also find that the automatic retrieval methods used to collect the corpus work well in finding mainstream documents, but include some documents in the conspiracy category that would not belong there based on our definition.