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From the Skeptical Inquirer
Dec. 11th, 2014 07:49 pmPreston Bost's "Crazy Beliefs, Sane Believers: toward a cognitive psychology of conspiracy ideation"
"Perhaps the most consistent finding is that people are relatively consistent in their conspiracy ideation; if they believe one conspiracy theory, they tend to have other conspiratorial beliefs ... Interestingly, conspiracy ideation also can bridge contradictory theories; Wood and colleagues observed that participants who endorsed the belief that Princess Diana had been murdered also tended to endorse the claim that she had faked her death. Researchers have taken these findings to confirms one of the first clearly articulated theories of conspiracy ideation: Goertzel's (1994) concept of a monological belief system, in which conspiracy ideation is a worldview -- rather than a collection of discrete beliefs -- in which multiple conspiracy theories reinforce each other."
"Perhaps the most consistent finding is that people are relatively consistent in their conspiracy ideation; if they believe one conspiracy theory, they tend to have other conspiratorial beliefs ... Interestingly, conspiracy ideation also can bridge contradictory theories; Wood and colleagues observed that participants who endorsed the belief that Princess Diana had been murdered also tended to endorse the claim that she had faked her death. Researchers have taken these findings to confirms one of the first clearly articulated theories of conspiracy ideation: Goertzel's (1994) concept of a monological belief system, in which conspiracy ideation is a worldview -- rather than a collection of discrete beliefs -- in which multiple conspiracy theories reinforce each other."
