| Popis: |
The present study is an exploratory study looking at the various dimensions of conspiracy theories that make them compelling. We want to test which of the following dimensions of conspiracies makes it more compelling. To do so we created novel conspiracies that tap into the following dimensions: • Conspiracies related to the body (e.g., Brain neurochemistry profoundly affected by radiation waves transmitted by common appliances.). • Conspiracies related to harming children (e.g., Children reported missing in the U.S. discovered abroad in foreign labor camps.). • Conspiracies related to realistic threats (e.g., Foreign countries sabotage the Western economies with cheap labor and automation.). • Conspiracies related to symbolic threat (e.g., American politicians corrupted by connections to Global Frankfurt Foundation.). These will be compared to other conspiratorial items that don’t tap into these dimensions (e.g., Films/TV shows have subliminal messages that seek to control human behavior). These conspiracies will be presented as newspaper headlines to the participants. Additionally, we will test which of the individual difference predictors predict increased belief in, recall of, and recognition of the conspiratorial headlines listed above. Specifically, we will test to see which of the following predictors have main effects: • National Attachment and Glorification (Roccas et al; 2006). • Right-wing Authoritarianism (Bizumic & Duckitt; 2018). • Social Dominance Orientation (Ho et al; 2015). • Religious fundamentalism (Altemeyer & Hunsberger; 2004—short scale determined by reliabilities and squared multiple correlations). • System Identity Threat (Federico, Williams & Vitriol; 2008). • Faith in Intuition (Alos-Ferrer et al., 2012) • Meaning in Life (Steger et al., 2006). Finally, we will also test for interaction effects between the variables listed above. |
