Like Henry Ford before him,
Elon Musk has emerged as America’s top conspiracy spreader. But he’s hardly alone.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the conspiracy-theory candidate for president, and as
Paul Krugman observed last summer, was attracting “support from some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley”:
Krugman didn't focus on conspiracy theory as such but on something closely related: distrust of experts and skepticism about widely accepted facts. He described this tendency as the “brain rotting drug” of reflexive contrarianism, quoting
economist Adam Ozimek.
That wasn’t exactly scientific, but a new paper entitled “
The Status Foundations of Conspiracy Beliefs” by Saverio Roscigno, a PhD candidate at the University of California, Irvine, is. Its most eye-catching finding is the discovery of “a cluster of graduate-degree-holding white men who display a penchant for conspiracy beliefs” that are “distinctively taboo.”
Specifically, Roscigno writes, “approximately a quarter of those who hold a graduate degree agree or strongly agree” that school shootings like those at Sandy Hook and Parkland “are false flag attacks perpetrated by the government,” which is “around twice the rate of those without graduate degrees.” Results are similar for the proposition that the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust “has been exaggerated on purpose.”
These findings are striking for many reasons. Most obviously, they go against the common belief — long supported by research — that conspiracist beliefs are more common among lower-income and less-educated individuals. They also challenge the formulation popularized by Joseph Uscinski that "conspiracy theories are for losers," and
should be understood as “alarm systems and coping mechanisms to help deal with foreign threat and domestic power centers” that “tend to resonate when groups are suffering from loss, weakness, or disunity.”
Roscigno’s findings don’t refute previous formulations so much as reframe them by adding greater nuance. For example, he finds that conspiracy beliefs are more common
both among the less educated and less affluent, on the one hand, and the more educated and more affluent on the other. Secondly, he identifies the subjective group experience of threat as a key element, rather than objective “loser” status.
Even more important, his paper reveals how much more we have to learn about conspiracy theories from a rigorous social science approach. Conspiracy theory is much more mainstream, varied and ubiquitous than previously assumed, and there’s much more to be learned from studying it as an integral part of the sociological landscape.
Like the recently published paper I previously covered
here, this model breaks with dualistic approaches that in some sense mirror what we find troubling about conspiracism — that is, painting the world in black-and-white rather than in many shades of gray. I recently spoke with Roscigno by Zoom about his findings and where they might lead. This transcript has been edited for clarity and length................
https://www.salon.com/2024/05/05/be...story.com&di=5f06cb3a5abfaa39f7adcca1317a0973