Conspiracy theories are abundant in social and political discourse, with serious consequences for individuals, groups, and societies. However, psychological scientists have started paying close attention to them only in the past 20 years. We review the spectacular progress that has since been made and some of the limitations of research so far, and we consider the prospects for further progress. To this end, we take a step back to analyze the defining features that make conspiracy theories different in kind from other beliefs and different in degree from each other. We consider how these features determine the adoption, consequences, and transmission of belief in conspiracy theories, even though their role as causal or moderating variables has seldom been examined. We therefore advocate for a research agenda in the study of conspiracy theories that starts—as is routine in fields such as virology and toxicology—with a robust descriptive analysis of the ontology of the entity at its center.

中文翻译：

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什么是阴谋论？其相关性、后果和沟通的定义方法


阴谋论在社会和政治话语中大量存在，对个人、群体和社会造成严重后果。然而，心理科学家直到近20年才开始密切关注它们。我们回顾了此后取得的巨大进展以及迄今为止研究的一些局限性，并考虑了进一步进展的前景。为此，我们退后一步来分析阴谋论与其他信仰在种类上和程度上不同的定义特征。我们考虑这些特征如何决定阴谋论信仰的采用、后果和传播，尽管它们作为因果或调节变量的作用很少被研究。因此，我们提倡阴谋论研究的研究议程，就像病毒学和毒理学等领域的惯例一样，首先对中心实体的本体论进行强有力的描述性分析。