Tornado Alley (PROG)

[blackhawks]

Mistrust and Misinformation: A Two-Component, Socio-Epistemic Model of Belief in Conspiracy Theories

This is the kine a shit that could create cognitive dissonance in you, were cognition one of your strong suits. Your posts, however, show that not to be the case.

Therefore I've emboldened the most salient points for you, not that there's a snowball's chance in hell that you'll grasp any of it.

But I try.

Authors

Joseph M. Pierre
Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Abstract

Although conspiracy theories are endorsed by about half the population and occasionally turn out to be true, they are more typically false beliefs that, by definition, have a paranoid theme.

Consequently, psychological research to date has focused on determining whether there are traits that account for belief in conspiracy theories (BCT) within a deficit model.

Alternatively, a two-component, socio-epistemic model of BCT is proposed that seeks to account for the ubiquity of conspiracy theories, their variance along a continuum, and the inconsistency of research findings likening them to psychopathology.

Within this model, epistemic mistrust is the core component underlying conspiracist ideation that manifests as the rejection of authoritative information, focuses the specificity of conspiracy theory beliefs, and can sometimes be understood as a sociocultural response to breaches of trust, inequities of power, and existing racial prejudices.

Once voices of authority are negated due to mistrust, the resulting epistemic vacuum can send individuals “down the rabbit hole” looking for answers where they are vulnerable to the biased processing of information and misinformation within an increasingly “post-truth” world.

Your world, your rabbit hole, in case you're lost.

The two-component, socio-epistemic model of BCT argues for mitigation strategies that address both mistrust and misinformation processing, with interventions for individuals, institutions of authority, and society as a whole.


https://jspp.psychopen.eu/index.php/jspp/article/view/5273