How to spot a conspiracy theorist in seconds

Mike Lindell speaks to the media as he attends Donald Trump's rally in Kinston, North Carolina, U.S., November 3, 2024. REUTERS/Jonathan Drake

The Internet is full of conspiracy theorists who, knowing the stigma associated with the “conspiracy theorist” label, try to conceal their tendencies by seeming reasonable. Yet a new study reveals a simple tell that these conspiracy theorists have — and it may not be what you think.

“Exploratory linguistic analyses revealed that conspiracism was associated with greater use of conspiracy-related vocabulary (e.g., deception, government), a disproportionate use of sophisticated words, and increased syntactic complexity,” explained the authors of a recent article in the scientific journal PLOS One. “These results suggest that conspiracism may emerge more readily at the lexical level rather than through fully structured narratives. We discuss potential methodological and theoretical factors contributing to these unexpected results, including the roles of context, perceived relevance, motivation, and collective social dynamics. We also consider the possibility that conspiracism may not directly translate into conspiratorial narratives.”

In other words, conspiracy theorists like to gussy up their arguments with ornate language and seemingly-sophisticated forms of analysis, all of which serve to conceal from the public whether their ideas are provably connected to demonstrable facts.

“If so, we recommend comparative research on online vs offline conspiratorial writing to clarify whether conspiracy theories emerge spontaneously from genuine beliefs or are constructed strategically, detached from genuinely held beliefs,” PLOS One concluded.

To learn this, the study authors asked participants to watch an apocalyptic thriller, Leave the World Behind,which is notable for its ambiguous ending. When the nearly 400 study participants were asked to write essays interpreting the movie’s vague information, the scholars — using AI to break down the statistics — found that conspiracy theorists use complex language to make their ideas seem more credible. The use of this language, and the fact that it is consistently untethered to any kind of concrete evidence, is the tell.

“We were surprised that conspiratorial narratives did not emerge as we had predicted,” Alessandro Miani, a researcher in the Department of Psychology at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland and the study’s lead author, told PsyPost's Eric W. Dolan. “We preregistered the hypothesis that people higher in conspiracism would ‘fill the gaps’ of an ambiguous film with conspiratorial interpretations, and we ran two studies with two different conspiracy-belief scales. In both, the expected link between conspiracism and conspiratorial narrative content simply wasn’t there.”

This is not the first study to determine how cognitive processes influence people believing or not believing in conspiracy theories. In February 2024, The Conversation released a breakdown of numerous studies that traced individual thinking styles to one’s propensity to believe in conspiracy theories.

“Research shows that our thinking style can be predictive of susceptibility to conspiracy theories,” The Conversation explained. “The dual processing theory of cognitive style suggests that we have two routes which we can use to process information.”

The Conversation added, “One route is the fast, intuitive route which leans more on personal experiences and gut feelings. The other route is a slower, more analytical route which instead relies on elaborative and detailed processing of information.” Overall “what you tend to see is that people who are not necessarily smarter but who favour the more effortful, analytical thinking style are more resistant to conspiracy beliefs. For example, a British 2014 study found that those who scored highly for questions such as ‘I enjoy problems that require hard thinking’ were less likely to accept conspiracy beliefs.”

The article added, “It also found those who were less likely to engage in effortful thinking styles and more likely to use intuitive thinking showed a higher belief in conspiracy theories.”

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