Scrutiny and accountability by and of social media
As Van Prooijen observes, belief in conspiracy theories is not a recent phenomenon, they have been around since the beginning of humankind. However, “modern communication technologies increase the speed through which people learn about conspiracy theories”, although he also suggests that it is unlikely that these technologies increase the number of people that ultimately believe in them, which is a surprising observation in our view. Van Prooijen does not provide specific research demonstrating this viewpoint, and my guess is that social media technologies such as Facebook, with billions of users, have the capacity to expand the reach of these conspiracy theories massively and rapidly.
Research conducted by a team from King’s College London suggests that “lives are being put at risk by conspiracy theories pumped out by unregulated social media platforms – people who rely on sites such as Facebook and others for information on coronavirus are more likely to reject lockdown (guidelines) than people who access news from other more traditional sources. There are growing calls for some form of control over potentially damaging conspiracy theory information being rapidly and widely spread through social media platforms. A simple Google search on a (conspiracy theory) subject can return 16 million hits (Researchgate.net): “This overwhelming access to information can drive the way people think and their behavior”, and some unscrupulous leaders clearly leverage this process.
Leadership matters
It is unfortunate that, particularly in the political sphere, many world leaders (and their surrogates and influencers), including those in the US, use emotional messaging to foster fear and uncertainty in order to gain support from their constituents. Research demonstrates that fear and uncertainty is a huge driver of belief in conspiracy theories. Indeed, many of these leaders specifically foster conspiracy theories and misinformation to create anxiety amongst the public in a tactic to gain support – we have heard the phrase “only I” can solve this problem! If one adds to this approach (as noted in the section in education levels) a constituency that tends to be less educated and lacking in critical thinking skills, the likelihood that these hoaxes will be believed are greatly heightened:
Our results indicate that the language used by conspiracy influencers as well as their followers on Twitter is more likely to be characterized by negative emotions such as anger. In addition, we found that conspiracy influencers and their followers use language related to power, death, and religion more than their science-focused counterparts” (The language of conspiracy: A psychological analysis of speech used by conspiracy theorists and their followers on Twitter. (Fong, et al., 2021)
Van Prooijen confirms that leaders are in the most influential position to overcome this fearmongering: “If one manages to transform widespread pessimism into optimism, irrational conspiracy theories will decrease among the public. As these aversive feelings are closely coupled with feeling out of control, we propose, likewise, that making people feel in control reduces conspiracy theories. Furthermore, to the extent that information often flows through a network (such as gossip network) rather than just the formal network, those people who are situated at the “node” (cross-roads) of the network might also be quite influential (Schon, 1973). Stated from a somewhat different perspective, people working at all levels of and providing functions of all kinds in an organization must experience a sense of empowerment in order to become less suspicious. Indeed, one study finds that having participants remember a time in their life when they felt completely in control reduced (belief in) conspiracy theories as compared to a neutral baseline condition”.
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