IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/repsxx/v9y2021i1p90-112.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Exposure to conspiracy theories in the lab

Author

Listed:
  • Loukas Balafoutas
  • Alexander Libman
  • Vasileios Selamis
  • Björn Vollan

Abstract

Conspiracy theories are widespread in the modern information era. Being exposed to conspiracy theories may affect behaviour, for example, by spreading mistrust among people and within organisations, even if it does not necessarily generate widespread beliefs in the conspiracy narrative. Our paper investigates the effect of exposure to conspiracy theories on strategic sophistication. We present evidence from a laboratory experiment, in which we prime half of our participants with exposure to a conspiracy theory. We find that such exposure leads to increased strategic sophistication. Using a causal mediation analysis we confirm that the effect on sophistication arises independently of whether people believe in the content or not.

Suggested Citation

  • Loukas Balafoutas & Alexander Libman & Vasileios Selamis & Björn Vollan, 2021. "Exposure to conspiracy theories in the lab," Economic and Political Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 9(1), pages 90-112, January.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:repsxx:v:9:y:2021:i:1:p:90-112
    DOI: 10.1080/20954816.2020.1818930
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/20954816.2020.1818930
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/20954816.2020.1818930?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:repsxx:v:9:y:2021:i:1:p:90-112. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/reps .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.