Still Very Much Dead and Alive: Re-reconsidering Belief in Contradictory Conspiracy Theories

Abstract

Incoherence has been considered a hallmark of belief in conspiracy theories (CTs). Previous research has assessed conspiratorial incoherence via the correlation between responses to contradictory items, with a higher correlation being seen as indicating greater incoherence. This approach has been successfully applied in many studies but nevertheless generated some skepticism, causing the literature on contradictions to be contradicting itself. Here we resolve these inconsistencies. We start by demonstrating that such correlations do not inform about the presence (nor absence) of incoherence. We propose and validate a novel way to identify incoherence from pairs of contradictory items. Applying this method, we reexamined published data from 12 studies with nearly 10,000 participants in which a measure of conspiracism, that is an individual’s propensity to accept CTs, was collected independently from belief in contradictory CTs. We found a strong link between conspiracism and incoherence (β = .70) and we established that 36.65% of conspiracy believers (vs. 3.73% of nonbelievers) endorse contradictory CTs. We also show that extreme cases of contradictory CTs (a person being dead and alive) do not eliminate contradictory endorsement. We confirm that the observed incoherence is not explainable by chance or careless responses. These results resolve the contradictions in the literature. Our method for assessing incoherence at the individual-participant level opens an opportunity for better statistical modeling of (conspiratorial) incoherence.