In the study of two surveys, other people who reported increased confidence in pandemic conspiracy theories, for which there is no evidence, likely claimed later that they believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump through widespread voter fraud, which is also not true. Participants’ general inclination to conspiracy theories is also higher among those who said COVID-19 was a hoax.
Based on the findings, researchers at Ohio State University proposed the “bridge conspiracy” hypothesis, which holds that conspiracy theory ideals triggered through a single occasion lead to an accumulation of conspiratorial thinking over time.
Early evidence suggests that a feeling of distrust may serve as a trigger.
“It’s speculative, but it turns out that once other people adopt a conspiracy belief, it sometimes fosters distrust of establishments — it can be just government, science, media, whatever,” said leader Russell Fazio, a professor of psychology at Ohio State. “Once you start looking at events through that cautious lens, it’s very easy to adopt more conspiracy theories. “
The exam is published in the journal PLOS ONE.
The picture of conspiracy theory studies is relatively young, and to date there has been a tendency to look for features that are waiting for the trend to conspiracy theories at any given time.
“But if you read interviews or forums frequented by conspiracy theorists, you see a phenomenon in which other people tend to fall into the rabbit hole after something happens in their lives that triggers a general interest in conspiracy theories,” Javier Granados Samayoa first said. who finished the paintings while a graduate student in psychology at Ohio State. “With COVID-19, there was this great occasion that other people may just not control, so how can they understand it?One way is to adhere to conspiracy theories. “
Researchers asked 501 participants in a June 2020 survey to answer questions assessing their ideals in COVID-19 conspiracy theories, political ideology and what’s known as conspiracy ideation, or their general affinity for conspiracy theories. In this section, participants used a 5-Points Scale ranging from “certainly true” to “certainly true” to rate statements such as “Some UFO sightings and rumors are planned or staged to distract the public from actual contact with extraterrestrials” and “New and complex technologies that would harm existing industry. “they are repressed. “
Six months later, in December 2020, 107 of those same participants responded to statements that measured their degree of conspiratorial thinking. The researchers further evaluated conspiracy theories by asking participants to report the extent to which they believed there had been voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. election.
Statistical research showed that participants who reported greater confidence that the SARS-CoV-2 virus had been released for difficult-to-understand purposes and that the severity of the COVID-19 disease had been exaggerated also expressed greater confidence that the 2020 election had been stolen from Trump. And compared to their fundamental conspiracy idea measured in the June survey, COVID skeptics had higher degrees of overall approval of conspiracy theories six months later.
The agreement remained true even after the research took into account the trade-off between trust in COVID-19 conspiracy theories and voter fraud and conservative political views, said Granados Samayoa, now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.
The team also cited knowledge of a giant multi-party survey in the United Kingdom conducted in early spring and past fall 2020 that supported the entry conspiracy hypothesis: The Ohio State team’s research showed that the confidence of a nationally representative pattern of British adults that the pandemic was a hoax that predicted an accumulation of conspiracy theories to the same time. long time.
Data from the state of Ohio showed a strong trend suggesting that the monetary misery of the lockdown may have been only one thing in adopting the ideals of pandemic conspiracy theory, even among those who started out with low degrees of conspiracy ideation.
“And then there’s the question: Once that happens, what adjusts over time?That’s where we were delivered in this longitudinal work, which was absent in previous research,” Fazio said.
While some theories beyond conspiracy have proven to be true, this study has focused on ideals that are not supported by evidence and are undermined by the evidence that exists. The researchers noted that a greater understanding of conspiracy thinking dynamics can prevent the spread of conspiracy theories, which are linked to an increased threat of violence and discrimination and poor fitness choices, among other negative individual and societal outcomes.
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