Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in other forums, provided the original authors and source are credited and subject to any copyright notices concerning any third-party graphics etc. Recent studies on conspiracy theories employ standardized questionnaires, thus neglecting their narrative qualities by reducing them to mere statements.
Recipients are considered as consumers only. The resulting 30 idiosyncratic stories imply that no clear distinction between official story and conspiratorial narrative is possible any more when the common approach of questionnaires is abandoned. Based on these findings, we present a new theoretical and methodological approach which acknowledges conspiracy theories as a means of constructing and communicating a set of personal values. While broadening the view upon such theories, we stay compatible with other approaches that have focused on extreme theory types.
In our view, accepting conspiracy theories as a common, regulative and possibly benign phenomenon, we will be better able to understand why some people cling to immunized, racist and off-wall storiesβand others do not. Keywords: conspiracy theories, narrative construction, personality science, individual differences, external validity, regulation, psychological methods.
So far, many psychological studies on conspiracy theories have confined themselves to a simpleβyet often misleadingβparadigm: The assumption that a clear distinction between an official truth and delusive idiosyncratic explanations can be made, and that supporters of conspiracy theories must hence be considered as individuals who have lost touch with reality and are in need for clear-cut explanations.
How do these basic assumptions account for the vast majority of conspiracy theories emerging from the highly interactive sphere of the new media?
