Abstract
This study examines the social impact of political conspiracy theories, focusing on how media exposure and individual predispositions lead to negative spillover effects on unrelated outgroups. Using an online survey experiment (N = 1,973), we test how media coverage of a fictitious conspiracy theory alleging malicious actions by a foreign government affects participants’ willingness to ostracize a secondary outgroup: the uninvolved citizens of the same country. We also assess the role of conspiracy mentality. We first exposed participants to one-sided full debunking, two-sided partial debunking, or neutral coverage of the alleged conspiracy, and then measured their willingness to ostracize the secondary outgroup through self-reports, a list experiment, and a Cyberball game. We found that although media exposure type did not significantly affect ostracism overall, significant interaction emerged among participants high in conspiracy mentality. For this group, one-sided full debunking increased ostracism relative to other conditions. Conspiracy mentality also consistently predicted ostracism across all measures. Our findings highlight the potential backfire effects of certain debunking styles for specific audiences and underscore the importance of individual predispositions in shaping behavioral responses to conspiracy theory coverage.
Keywords
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
