Conspiracy Beliefs: Their Development and Representation

Conspiracy beliefs and theories are pervasive in current public discourse, politics, and academia. Many approaches in mental health and academia use a conventional realist approach, which understands conspiracy beliefs as being a result of cognitive biases, psychopathology, and irrationality. The current study adopted a sociocultural approach, aiming to explore how conspiracy beliefs and their development are represented by people who hold them and the UK media.

The first aspect of the study considered the narratives of how conspiracy beliefs develop from conspiracy believers’ perspectives. The second aspect sought to explore how conspiracy theories and beliefs are represented in UK news media. A mixed method approach involved qualitative narrative interviews with three men and a media analysis with 242 articles from four UK newspapers. A reflexive thematic analysis of interviews produced three themes; ‘Questioning "the Truth",’ ‘Exposure to "New Truths”’ and ‘Underbelly of "the Truth".’ The media analysis found negative representations of conspiracy beliefs in the UK news media, particularly around conspiracy beliefs being false, concerning, ridiculed, ‘mad’ and uncontextualised.

The results highlighted the presence of adversity in terms of community and societal experiences in interviewee’s narratives of the development of beliefs but this was not represented consistently in the media. Positive representations were present in individual’s narratives but not in media depictions of conspiracy beliefs. There was opposition between conspiracy believers’ and media’s representations of the “truth,” with both presenting themselves as having validity. Finally, threat seemed to be represented differently, with media portraying conspiracy beliefs as dangerous, whereas conspiracy believers represented dominant institutions including the media as the threat. The current research contributed preliminary findings around how conspiracy beliefs and their development are represented differently across stakeholders and the utility of using sociocultural approaches and considerations of power in this field. Implications for key stakeholders were considered.