The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories by Jan-Willem van Prooijen

Author:Jan-Willem van Prooijen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Connecting One’s Own Identity to a Group

The previous discussion suggests a straightforward proposition about the social roots of conspiracy theories: The more strongly people connect their own identity with a particular group, the more likely they are to believe conspiracy theories when members of that group are victimized. In a series of experiments together with Leiden University Professor Eric van Dijk, we tested this basic idea.3 We carried out a series of experiments among Dutch participants, and somewhat paradoxically, as a starting point we wanted a group or a country that Dutch participants would be un likely to experience strong personal connections with. Ideally, our research required a country elsewhere in the world that is rarely (if ever) in the Dutch news, that Dutch people do not typically travel to, and for which our participants would be unlikely to know much of the actual culture or political situation. In the end, we came up with Benin: A small country in the northwest of Africa. In our research study, participants would read a fake newspaper article about events that supposedly took place in Benin.

Why focus on a country that our research participants would be unfamiliar with? The main advantage of this approach is that we could start out with a group that participants do not connect their identity to, and then test what happens if we stimulate participants to become personally concerned about that group. The best test of our idea involves a comparison between people who do versus do not experience strong personal connections with a particular group – and generally speaking, it is much easier to make people connect their identity to a previously unfamiliar group than to make people feel indifferent about a group they otherwise experience strong connections with. Academic psychologists have various interventions in their research toolbox that can stimulate people to connect their own identity with a different group. One such intervention is perspective taking, a well-known method to create feelings of empathy and identification. Perspective taking means that one actively tries to understand a situation from someone else’s perspective. Such perspective taking can, under some circumstances, improve relationships between different groups and reduce stereotyping.4 In the context of our research, we told all participants that they would read a newspaper article about events happening in Benin, but we gave only half of the participants perspective-taking instructions. Specifically, we asked these participants to first for a minute try to take the perspective of the citizens of Benin and to imagine that they themselves were born and raised in Benin. They were asked to continue such perspective taking while reading the article. The other half of the participants constituted the control group. Instead of perspective-taking instructions, these participants were asked to read the article as objectively as possible.

The article that participants subsequently read portrayed a political opposition leader in Benin who was doing well in the polls and who was likely to win the upcoming elections. But then the opposition leader was involved in a terrible car crash.

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