The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. CF18-1108 (ROPH: Center for Research on Online Political Hostility) from the Carlsberg Foundation to MBP. įunding: This research was funded by grant no. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: All informational and reproducibility materials are available at. Received: SeptemAccepted: FebruPublished: March 10, 2022Ĭopyright: © 2022 Mus et al. PLoS ONE 17(3):Įditor: Peter Karl Jonason, University of Padova, ITALY

We find firm evidence that participants categorize by environmental position, but no evidence that the use of conspiratorial statements increases categorization strength and thus serves a coalitional function.Ĭitation: Mus M, Bor A, Bang Petersen M (2022) Do conspiracy theories efficiently signal coalition membership? An experimental test using the “ Who Said What?” design.

To test this prediction, quota sampled American participants (total N = 2462) completed two pre-registered Who-Said-What experiments where we measured if participants spontaneously categorize targets based on their environmental position, and if this categorization process is enhanced by the use of a conspiratorial frame. Taking the domain of environmental policy as our case, we examine the hypothesis that beliefs framed in a conspiratorial manner act as more efficient coalitional markers of environmental position than similar but non-conspiratorial beliefs. To our knowledge, no previous studies have empirically investigated this claim. A key implication of this theory is that cognitive systems designed for alliance detection should intuitively interpret the endorsement of conspiracy theories as coalitional cues. Specifically, fringe and offensive statements such as conspiracy theories are expected to send a highly credible signal of coalition membership by clearly distinguishing the speaker’s group from other groups. Theoretical work in evolutionary psychology have proposed that conspiracy theories may serve a coalitional function.

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