Conspiratorial thinking, also known as conspiracist ideation, has been repeatedly
implicated in the rejection of scientic propositions (Diethelm & McKee, 2009; Goertzel,
2010; Kalichman, 2009; McKee & Diethelm, 2010). Conspiracist ideation generally refers
to the propensity to explain a signicant political or social event as a secret plot by
powerful individuals or organizations (Sunstein & Vermeule, 2009). When conspiracist
ideation is involved in the rejection of science, ideations tend to invoke alternative
explanations for the nature or source of the scientic evidence. For example, among
people who reject the link between HIV and AIDS, common ideations involve the beliefs
that AIDS was created by the U.S. Government to control the African American
population or that people who take medicines for HIV are guinea pigs for the government
(Bogart & Thorburn, 2005; Kalichman, 2009). Among African Americans, 16% and 44%
of respondents, respectively, have been found to endorse those two beliefs (Bogart &
Thorburn, 2005). Given that such conspiracist ideation has been associated with sexual
risk-taking behaviors (Bogart, Galvan, Wagner, & Klein, 2011), the prominence of
conspiracist ideation among people living with HIV should give rise to concern. AIDS
denial also invokes ideations of censorship to explain why dissenting scientists who
question the link between HIV and AIDS fail to insert their ideas into the peer-reviewed
literature (Kalichman, 2009).1
The belief that censorship, rather than evidence-based peer-review, underlies a
consensus in the scientific literature also suffuses other arenas of science denial, such as in
climate science (e.g., McKewon, 2012a; Solomon, 2008) and medical research other than
HIV/AIDS. For example, the tobacco industry referred to research on the health eects of
smoking in internal documents as \a vertically integrated, highly concentrated,oligopolistic
cartel" (Abt, 1983, p. 127), which in combination with \public monopolies"
. . . \manufactures alleged evidence, suggestive inferences linking smoking to various
diseases, and publicity and dissemination and advertising of these so-called ndings" (Abt,
1983, p. 126).
Because peer review tends to eliminate ideas that are not supported by evidence
(e.g., questioning the link between HIV and AIDS lost intellectual respectability decades
ago; Nattrass, 2010, 2011), much of science denial involves the internet. The internet
provides a platform for individuals who reject a scientic consensus to arm \each other's
feelings of persecution by a corrupt elite" (McKee & Diethelm, 2010, pp. 1310{1311).
Internet sites such as blogs dedicated to a specic issue have therefore become hubs for
science denial and they arguably play a major role in the creation and dissemination of
conspiracist ideation.
The role of conspiracist ideation, and its communication through the blogosphere
are also prominent in the denial of the benets of vaccinations. Content analyses have
shown that YouTube videos critical of HPV vaccinations (Briones, Nan, Madden, & Waks,
2012) and anti-vaccination blogs (Zimmerman et al., 2005) are suused with conspiratorial
content. Common conspiracist themes include alleged government cover-ups of vaccine
information or suggestions that a vaccine solely exists to maximize the prot of
pharmaceutical companies (Briones et al., 2012; Kata, 2010). The anti-vaccine movement
has had demonstrably serious adverse public-health impacts (Poland & Jacobson, 2012).
For example, nations that discontinued or reduced use of the pertussis (whooping cough)
vaccine under public pressure now experience an incidence of the often fatal disease that is
10 to 100 times greater than countries that have continued vaccinations (Gangarosa et al.,
1998). Lewandowsky, Ecker, Seifert, Schwarz, and Cook (2012) provide a review of the
societal and cognitive processes that underlie the spread of misinformation provided by
groups such as the anti-vaccination movement.
The rejection of climate science has been particularly infused with notions of a
conspiracy among scientists. Accusations of conspiracies within the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were aired in the opinion pages of the Wall Street
Journal (WSJ ) as early as 1996 (Lahsen, 1999; Oreskes & Conway, 2010), in a piece that
alleged a \. . . disturbing corruption of the peer-review process." The charges focused on
Chapter 8, a key component of the 1995 IPCC report that was concerned with the
attribution of global warming to human activities. The WSJ piece was authored by an
individual who had no part in the IPCC process, and subsequent scholarly work traced
the origin of the charge of conspiracy and corruption to a document produced by the
Global Climate Coalition, a lobby group representing 60 companies and trade
associations, primarily from the energy sector (Lahsen, 1999). In her analysis of this
controversy, Lahsen identied clear conspiracist themes and concluded that conspiracy
theories are \. . . rhetorical means by which to cast suspicion on scientic and political
opponents" (p. 133).
Accordingly, the titles of recent popular books critical of mainstream climate science
are replete with hints of a conspiracy, with terms such as \hoax" (Bell, 2011; Inhofe,
2012), \corruption" (Montford, 2010), \scam" (Sussman, 2010), \fraud" (Solomon, 2008),
or \junk science" (Isaac, 2012) being quite common. Some books have appealed directly
to an alleged \conspiracy" (Inhofe, 2012), whereas others invoked a conspiracy obliquely
by referring to global warming as an \assertion" by the United Nations (Alexander, 2009).
Similarly, McKewon (2012a) identied broad conspiracist themes in a narrative analysis of
press coverage in response to one particular climate-\skeptic" book in Australia.
Conspiracist ideation is arguably particularly prominent on climate blogs, such as
when expressing the belief that climate scientists \colluded with government ocials to
ignore the law" (e.g., Condon, 2009), or that \. . . the alarmists who oversee the collection
and reporting of the data simply erase the actual readings and substitute their own
desired readings in their place" (Taylor, 2012). The role of the blogosphere in climate
denial cannot be ignored: One blogger triggered several Congressional investigations into a
Nature paper on paleoclimatology in the 2000's, and the blogosphere continues to
reverberate with alleged scandals involving climate scientists. Analyses of the blogosphere,
and how it contributes to conspiracist ideation and science denial are therefore of
considerable importance.
Lewandowsky et al. placed links to their study on a number of climate blogs with a
pro-science orientation but a diverse audience of readers, including a notable proportion of
climate \skeptics." The survey queried people's belief in the free market (which previous
research had identied as an important predictor of the rejection of climate science; Heath
& Giord, 2006), their acceptance of climate science, their acceptance of other scientic
propositions such as the link between HIV and AIDS, and most important in the present
context, conspiracist ideation The figure shows the structural-equation model that captured the relationship
between latent variables (the large circles in the gure). Each latent variable was measured
by several items (manifest variables; not shown). For example, people's endorsement of
the free market was measured by items such as \An economic system based on free
markets unrestrained by government interference automatically works best to meet human
needs" and (reverse-coded) \Free and unregulated markets pose important threats to
sustainable development" (Heath & Giord, 2006). In replication of much previous
research (e.g., Heath & Giord, 2006; Kahan et al., 2012), endorsement of free-market
ideology emerged as a strong predictor of the rejection of climate science. Free-market
ideology was also found to predict the rejection of other scientic propositions.
Of greater interest in the present context is the association between conspiracist
ideation and the rejection of climate science and other scientic propositions, although the
strength of this association was considerably less than that of free-market ideology. The
conspiracy test items were adapted from previous research (e.g., Swami,
Chamorro-Premuzic, & Furnham, 2009) and consisted of various conspiracies that
respondents could endorse or reject, such as \A powerful and secretive group known as the
New World Order are planning to eventually rule the world through an autonomous world
government which would replace sovereign governments" and \The Apollo moon landings
never happened and were staged in a Hollywood lm studio," and so on.
C'mon guy, it's the off-season tone it down a notch.
