ArticlePloS one2019
Pathways to conspiracy: The social and linguistic precursors of involvement in Reddit's conspiracy theory forum.
Article in PloS one, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Leave the world(view) behind, but keep the words: The effect of conspiracism on writing.PloS one · 2026Article
- Topological data mapping of online hate speech, misinformation, and general mental health: A large language model based study.PLOS digital health · 2025Article
- Owners of a conspiratorial heart? Investigating the longitudinal relationship between loneliness and conspiracy beliefs.The British journal of social psychology · 2025Article
- Article
- The strength of conspiracy beliefs versus scientific information: the case of COVID 19 preventive behaviours.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Online conspiracy communities are more resilient to deplatforming.PNAS nexus · 2023Article
- IRMA: the 335-million-word Italian coRpus for studying MisinformAtion.Proceedings of the conference. Association for Computational Linguistics. Meeting · 2023Article
- Just world beliefs, personal success and beliefs in conspiracy theories.Current psychology (New Brunswick, N.J.) · 2023Article
- Individual, intergroup and nation-level influences on belief in conspiracy theories.Nature reviews psychology · 2023Review
- RPC-Lex: A dictionary to measure German right-wing populist conspiracy discourse online.Convergence (London, England) · 2022Article
- LOCO: The 88-million-word language of conspiracy corpus.Behavior research methods · 2022Article
- Polarization and trust in the evolution of vaccine discourse on Twitter during COVID-19.PloS one · 2022Observational
- Conspiracy theories on Twitter: emerging motifs and temporal dynamics during the COVID-19 pandemic.International journal of data science and analytics · 2022Article
- Do your own research!Synthese · 2022Article
- The COVID-19 pandemic and the search for structure: Social media and conspiracy theories.Social and personality psychology compass · 2021Article
- COVID-19 Scientific Facts vs. Conspiracy Theories: Is Science Failing to Pass Its Message?International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Many individuals who engage with conspiracy theories come to do so through a combination of individual and social factors. The interaction between these factors is challenging to study using traditional experimental designs. Reddit.com is a large connected set of online discussion forums, including one (r/conspiracy) devoted to wide-ranging discussion of conspiracy theories. The availability of large datasets of user comments from Reddit give a unique opportunity to observe human behavior in social spaces and at scale. Using a retrospective case control study design, we analyzed how Reddit users who would go on to engage with a conspiracy-related forum differed from other users in the language they use, differences in the social environments where they posted, and potential interactions between the two factors. Together, the analyses provide evidence for self-selection into communities with a shared set of interests which can feed into a conspiratorial world-view, and that these differences are detectable relative to controls even before users begin to post in r/conspiracy. We also suggest that survey-based and experimental studies may benefit from differentiating between passive private endorsement by individuals and active engagement with conspiracy theories in social spaces.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.