Online conspiracy theorists are more diverse (and ordinary) than most assume
- Written by Colin Klein, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Australian National University
Conspiracy theories are known for connecting apparently unrelated events. Consider the X-Files’ Fox Mulder holed up in his office, frantically joining seemingly random dots. Or the American radio host Alex Jones connecting leaked Clinton emails and fuzzy rover pictures to conclude that NASA is running a child slave colony on Mars.
Cognitive psychologists have often claimed that conspiracy theorists possess a “monological” belief system, in which belief in one conspiracy leads to belief in others. Eventually, they explain every significant event, however unrelated, through the same conspiratorial “logic”.
On such a view, conspiracy theorists are fundamentally irrational, perhaps even pathologically so. But is this an oversimplification?
So-called “big data” approaches to psychology can give a unique perspective on these questions. By using large datasets gathered from social media websites, one can look at people interacting in everyday settings. Importantly, these approaches can capture everybody, not just the most vocal members of a community.
In a recent paper we used online comments to examine individuals who are interested in these types of ideas. We examined a complete set of comments over eight years from the conspiracy forum of reddit.com.
Our dataset included 2.2 million comments from roughly 130,000 distinct user names. Our analyses used topic modelling, a type of linguistic analysis that tries to find common themes across a large collection of documents.
We were able to identify 12 distinct subgroups of individuals who used language in different ways and who varied widely in their interests and their posting habits. What they talked about strongly suggested that they held different beliefs and attitudes about a range of conspiracies.
Eleven of these had consistent enough interests to be readily interpretable. We assigned each of them a name and created aggregate sample comments, as shown in this diagram.
![Online conspiracy theorists are more diverse (and ordinary) than most assume](https://images.theconversation.com/files/212331/original/file-20180327-109175-1gu9oyw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip)
Authors: Colin Klein, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Australian National University