A new study featured in Political Psychology revealed that exposure to opposing political views on social media can paradoxically increase polarization by backfiring, as people double down on their beliefs when encountering disagreement. The research, based on a field experiment with Democrats and Republicans on Twitter, shows that financial incentives to follow bots sharing counter-attitudinal content still led to the reinforcement of partisan attitudes rather than moderation.
Eric Dolan at PsyPost cited the study, noting that identifying those who believe in conspiracy theories can also predict whether an individual endorses specific political rumors, but primarily when those rumors attack their political rivals.
Dolan explained that in previous research, there were two separate ways to predict such beliefs. One is "conspiracy thinking" while the other is belief in their own political wing.
"They usually accept theories that blame their political rivals and reject theories that accuse their own side. The researchers designed this study to see if these two separate factors actually interact with one another," wrote Dolan.
Those who buy into conspiracy thinking have a stronger tendency towards belief when the conspiracy also aligns with the person's own political bias.
"People naturally want to protect the reputation of their own group while assuming the worst about their opponents. Because of this natural bias, the researchers expected that people who are highly prone to conspiratorial thinking would eagerly accept rumors about their rivals," said Dolan.
Study author Omer Yair explained that he has an interest in conspiracy theories within political sects.
“And over the last few years I have read many articles showing that both political preferences, such as party identification, and 'conspiracy thinking' (AKA conspiracy mentality), i.e., people’s tendency to believe in conspiracy theories, independently explain belief in partisan conspiracy theories," he said.
So, he began researching whether a combination of the two could help explain why partisan conspiracy theories became more popular.
"A short search in the literature found no empirical support for such an interaction, so we gathered data from several surveys and found consistent support for our interaction hypothesis," said Yair.
The researchers compared data from six studies, two of which were from the United States political system. It resulted in a sample size of nearly 11,000 participants.
There were 61 conspiracy theories that individuals were asked about, and approximately half were about politics, while 31 dealt with issues like aliens, etc...
The studies all examined a level of conspiracy thinking on a four-question scale. They were asked to rank their agreement with statements such as, "a group of unknown people secretly controls the country," or "major events are the result of hidden plots."
They then used the level of belief in specific theories, combining all of the data to test the relationship between the two.
"The researchers found that general conspiracy thinking strongly predicts belief in political conspiracy theories, but this relationship depends heavily on political alignment. When a theory accused a person’s political rivals of wrongdoing, their underlying tendency to believe in conspiracies strongly activated. In these situations, highly conspiratorial individuals were very likely to believe the rumor," summarized the report.
So, when a conspiracy theory challenges the person's own political party, they're less likely to believe it.
Yair said that there could be future research done that examines ideas in a more social context that looks specifically at race, gender or nationality.
