Language and social factors

The r/conspiracy group users exhibited clear differences from other similar Reddit users in terms of both where they posted and what they posted. These differences in language use and social environment provide support for some of the theories of conspiracy belief.

First, there were clear differences in overall language use between r/conspiracy group and the matched control group. Most of the Empath factors exhibiting strong differences were associated with prior literature suggesting that a “conspiratorial mindset” leads to endorsement of conspiracy theories (Table 1). In general, Empath factors for which we observed a clear positive difference were aligned with issues of hierarchy and abuses of power. Also notable were Empath categories like “deception” and “terrorism”, which can be linked to an idea that is central to many conspiracy theories: that of hidden enemies among us.

Some have argued that the key psychological feature of conspiracy theorists is a “monological belief system” in which everything connects to everything else [3,39,42]. Recent work on r/conspiracy suggests that users with monological belief systems are responsible for the majority of posts but make up only a small percentage of users [62]. However, these results are not necessarily incompatible. A monological belief system may simply be the most extreme, and most salient, version of a more general conspiratorial mindset. Further, one lesson from these results might be the need to distinguish factors which lead people to engage with conspiracy theories in the first place from the factors which distinguish more and less extreme engagement with conspiracy theories. This would fit well with recent work emphasizing the multidimensionality of conspiracy constructs [100].

We did not find evidence to support previous literature observing differences in personality traits or varieties of compensation or psychopathology. Where previous literature focused on negative emotional states as drivers of conspiracy theory endorsement, we only found evidence for the non-specific ‘negative_emotion’ Empath category (d = 0.24). Equally striking was the lack of difference in use of language related to anger, disaffection, or other compensatory emotions. This contradicts some of the accounts that focus on the hostility of conspiracy endorsers [101], but concords with more recent work that highlights the lack of hostility in comments from conspiracy endorsers. For example, Wood and Douglas [102] carried out a study of conspiracy related comments on a news website. Comments were divided into "conspiricist" (those arguing for a conspiratorial explanation of events) and "conventionalist" (those arguing for a conventional account of events) comments, with a focus on comments judged to be aimed at persuading others. These comments were then rated for tone. Interestingly, comments from conspiricists were rated as less hostile than the comments from "conventionalists". Our findings lend support to this conclusion. We found evidence that r/conspiracy users were less likely than the control group to use terms from Empath categories “affection”, “optimism”, and “friends”, which might be suggestive of alienation or social isolation [18,22].

Some of the divergence from previous findings may come from the use of matched controls. Our study compared Reddit users who would go on to post in r/conspiracy with users who began posting on Reddit at the same time and in the same subreddits. People who endorse conspiracy theories may appear angrier or more disaffected compared to a general population, but this may be more common across online discourse and Reddit users in general.

Importantly, Wood and Douglas [102] point out the need to distinguish the target and type of hostility: to whom and regarding what features is a comment hostile? Conspiracy theorists might often be hostile towards others for being "dupes" of the system; non-conspiracy believers might be hostile towards the perceived paranoia of conspiricists, or their propensity to creative, ad-hoc additions in order to shore up their theories, and so on. This is a potential confound in our study. Whereas Wood and Douglas first selected comments as either conspiricist or conventionalist, our study of conspiracy posters includes those who go on to argue against conspiracy theorists as well as for them. If non-conspiricists tend to be angrier towards those who forward conspiracy theories, this may affect what we found in the tone of users who ended up in the conspiracy forum versus those who did not. Moreover, as we have suggested, there may be a greater effect of anger in general on reddit, which could make communities look more similar on this variable. That said, we looked at hostile language across a variety of subreddits, not just conspiracy-focused ones, suggesting that hostility is not being driven solely by conspiracy-related factors.

There may also be important differences between the phenomena we have focused on and those that have been the focus of previous studies. As we discussed, we examined people who have sought out a forum dedicated to conspiracy theories who actively discuss and share thoughts on the topic. This might be a different phenomena to simply passively endorsing conspiracy theories when questioned about them. This might be relevant to our findings on powerlessness. One possibility is that the type of sharing and active engagement seen in the forum is itself a type of reclaiming of power, a place to put forward ones thoughts, help out one’s peers and the wider community to see the truth, and so on. Passive engagement, by contrast, may stem from or promote powerlessness (and would be difficult for this method to detect). This might potentially be a source of difference when it comes to results regarding feelings of powerlessness.

There was also a clear difference in the risk profiles of different theme communities. The highest risk by far was in the “Politics” theme community, where there were 2.4 times as many r/conspiracy users posting in the subreddits compared to the control group, and they posted 5 times as many comments overall. Though there was the appearance of a skew to the political right in the subreddits included in the “Politics” theme community, this group also includes subreddits such as r/progressive; as well as relatively neutral subreddits such as r/PoliticalDiscussion and debate-oriented subreddits like r/DebateReligion, which cater to a wide variety of political leanings. Some of the spread is likely due to the vigorous debate across political positions that characterizes Reddit, but it appears that political debate (broadly construed) is especially attractive to users who would go on to post in r/conspiracy.

A useful framework that encompasses both the language use and social environments was suggested by Douglas and Wood [103,102,40], who note that endorsement of certain first-order conspiracy beliefs seems to be mediated by higher-order beliefs about the existence of cover-ups. Similarly, McCauley and Jacques [14] suggest that individuals believe, on Bayesian grounds, that conspiracies are more likely to be successful. As has been emphasized in the past (including by members of r/conspiracy), some conspiracy theories have proven to be true. As we noted above, for example, there is a relationship between conspiracy endorsement about medical experimentation among the African American community and awareness of actual abuses and cover-ups around the same issue. The conspiratorial mindset need not be read as wholly irrational: it may instead reflect awareness of actual past abuses of power. This is consistent with the “conspiratorial mindset” markers noted in the broad language analysis.

Notable over-representation by both user-count and post-count also occurred in the theme communities we labeled “Drugs and Bitcoin” and “Toxic Reddit”. The former includes a heterogeneous set of topics (including UFO and paranormal speculation) but can be characterized by a willingness to engage with socially “fringe” ideas of many kinds. The “Toxic Reddit” theme community also represents fringe engagement, but instead on the edges of acceptable taste. The most popular subreddits appear comparatively innocuous, but include r/KotakuInAction, which is a known hotbed of sexism and racism. Further, the subreddits in which r/conspiracy posters are also most over-represented include several that have since been banned for questionable content, such as r/WhiteRights and r/fatpeoplehate.

The inclusion of these subreddits suggests that the “conspiratorial mindset” tag may be in need of further refinement. On the one hand, it skirts tautology if read literally: claiming that people find a particular conspiracy attractive because they find conspiracy theories generally attractive carries relatively little explanatory power. On the other hand, the label may be overly restrictive. The more general affective consideration may be that conspiracy theories are outside of the mainstream of ordinary thinking, and that some people are attracted to a range of non-mainstream beliefs. That would assimilate conspiracy endorsement to a broader range of endorsements, which may in turn suggest novel lines of research.

Some of the discrepancies between our results and previous experimental studies may be due to differences in the population under study. In our analyses, we observed conspiracy engagement—users who were actively posting comments on stories in the r/conspiracy subreddit. Most experimental studies focus on willingness to endorse conspiracy theories, which appears to be more prevalent [11]. General powerlessness may make acceptance of conspiracy theories more attractive—but it requires a conspiratorial mindset to engage with and spread conspiracy theories in a social context. Taxonomizing individuals by the contents of their belief (i.e. by discussing “conspiracy theorists”) may thus be too coarse a cut for scientific purposes, and more fine-grained categorizations may be needed to capture the full dynamics of conspiracy endorsement. Our results suggest that people who are willing to discuss conspiracy theories in a social context are different from, or a special subset of the relatively broad populations who would endorse conspiracy theories when asked in isolation.