Miani Alessandro, Hills Thomas, Bangerter Adrian
Institute of Work and Organizational Psychology, University of Neuchâtel, Rue Emile-Argand 11, 2000 Neuchâtel, Switzerland.
Department of Psychology, University of Warwick, University Road, Coventry CV47AL, UK.
Sci Adv. 2022 Oct 28;8(43):eabq3668. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abq3668. Epub 2022 Oct 26.
Conspiracy theories may arise out of an overarching conspiracy worldview that identifies common elements of subterfuge across unrelated or even contradictory explanations, leading to networks of self-reinforcing beliefs. We test this conjecture by analyzing a large natural language database of conspiracy and nonconspiracy texts for the same events, thus linking theory-driven psychological research with data-driven computational approaches. We find that, relative to nonconspiracy texts, conspiracy texts are more interconnected, more topically heterogeneous, and more similar to one another, revealing lower cohesion within texts but higher cohesion between texts and providing strong empirical support for an overarching conspiracy worldview. Our results provide inroads for classification algorithms and further exploration into individual differences in belief structures.
阴谋论可能源于一种总体的阴谋世界观，这种世界观在不相关甚至相互矛盾的解释中识别出阴谋诡计的共同元素，从而形成自我强化的信念网络。我们通过分析针对同一事件的大量阴谋论和非阴谋论文本的自然语言数据库来检验这一推测，从而将理论驱动的心理学研究与数据驱动的计算方法联系起来。我们发现，相对于非阴谋论文本，阴谋论文本之间的联系更紧密，主题更具异质性，彼此之间更相似，这表明文本内部的凝聚力较低，但文本之间的凝聚力较高，为总体的阴谋世界观提供了有力的实证支持。我们的研究结果为分类算法以及进一步探索信念结构中的个体差异开辟了道路。
