ArticleScience advances2022
Interconnectedness and (in)coherence as a signature of conspiracy worldviews.
Article in Science advances, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 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
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Denialist vs. warmist climate change conspiracy beliefs: Ideological roots, psychological correlates and environmental implications.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2026Article
- Still very much dead and alive: Incoherence in conspiracism as a departure from Bayesian rationality.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Cross-Cultural Validation of Manual and Automated Methods for Extracting Trauma Memory Features and Predicting PTSD in Young Populations.Research on child and adolescent psychopathology · 2026Article
- Leave the world(view) behind, but keep the words: The effect of conspiracism on writing.PloS one · 2026Article
- Testing the persuasiveness of conspiracy theories: a comparison of narrative and argumentative strategies.Cognitive processing · 2025Article
- Perplexity and proximity: Large language model perplexity complements semantic distance metrics for the detection of incoherent speech.Journal of biomedical informatics · 2025Article
- Article
- IRMA: the 335-million-word Italian coRpus for studying MisinformAtion.Proceedings of the conference. Association for Computational Linguistics. Meeting · 2023Article
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
Conspiracy theories may arise out of an overarching conspiracy worldview that identifies common elements of subterfuge across unrelated or even contradictory explanations, leading to networks of self-reinforcing beliefs. We test this conjecture by analyzing a large natural language database of conspiracy and nonconspiracy texts for the same events, thus linking theory-driven psychological research with data-driven computational approaches. We find that, relative to nonconspiracy texts, conspiracy texts are more interconnected, more topically heterogeneous, and more similar to one another, revealing lower cohesion within texts but higher cohesion between texts and providing strong empirical support for an overarching conspiracy worldview. Our results provide inroads for classification algorithms and further exploration into individual differences in belief structures.
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.