Conspiracy Theories: A Cultural Evolution Theory approach

Conspiracy theories have been part of human culture for hundreds of years, if not millennia, and have been the subject of research in academic fields such as Social Psychology, Political Science and Cultural Studies. At present, there has been little research examining conspiracy theories from a Cultural Evolution perspective. This chapter discusses the value of Cultural Evolution approaches to understanding the diffusion of conspiracy theories. Focusing on the role of biases in cultural transmission, it argues that a key advantage of applying a Cultural Evolution approach to this phenomenon is that it provides a strong theoretical and methodological framework to bridge the individual, inter-individual and population level factors that explain the cultural success of conspiracy theories, with potential for producing insights into how to limit their negative influence

Content-based learning biases

Cognitive mechanisms which increase the likelihood that individuals will copy or adopt certain behaviours or mental representations based on the inherent characteristics (content) of those behaviours/representations, operating through processes of attention, memory, and/or transmissibility

Curious about threats: Morbid curiosity and interest in conspiracy theories

Conspiracy theories provide explanations of important events or circumstances which allege a secret plot between two or more powerful actors as the salient cause, and commonly highlight the threat presented by the plot and its conspirators. Given the importance of threat in conspiracy theories, an interest in obtaining threat-related information might predispose one to be interested in conspiracy theory. Morbid curiosity describes the tendency to seek out information about threatening or dangerous situations and is associated with an interest in threat-related entertainment. Across three studies we investigated the relationship between morbid curiosity and conspiracy theories. We found that higher trait morbid curiosity was associated with higher general conspiracist beliefs (Study 1) and the perceived threat of conspiratorial explanations of events (Study 2). Using a behavioural choice paradigm, we found that participants who chose to investigate morbidly curious stimuli were more likely to choose to learn about conspiratorial explanations for events (Study 3). Greater curiosity about the minds of dangerous people was consistently the strongest predictor of conspiratorial ideation and interest. These results suggest that morbid curiosity is an important but hitherto unstudied predictor of conspiratorial interest and belief

The Cognitive Foundations of Fictional Stories

We hypothesize that fictional storiesare highly successful in human cultures partly because they activateevolved cognitive mechanisms, for instance for finding mates (e.g., in romance fiction), exploring the world (e.g., in adventure and speculative fiction), or avoiding predators (e.g., in horror fiction). In this paper, we put forward a comprehensive framework to study fiction through this evolutionary lens.The primary goal of this framework is to carve fictional storiesat their cognitive jointsusing an evolutionary framework. Reviewinga wide range of adaptive variations in human psychology–in personality and developmental psychology, behavioral ecology, and evolutionary biology, among other disciplines –, this framework also addresses the question ofinterindividual differences in preferences for different features in fictional stories. It generates a wide range of predictions about the patterns ofcombinations of such features, according to the pattenrs of variations in the mechanisms triggered by fictional stories. As a result of a highly collaborative effort, we present a comprehensive review of evolved cognitive mechanisms that fictional stories activate.To generate this review, we (1) listedmore than 70adaptivechallengeshumans faced in the course of their evolution, (2) identifiedthe adaptive psychological mechanisms that evolved in response to such challenges, (3) specifiedfoursources ofadaptive variabilityfor the sensitivity of each mechanism(i.e., personality traits, sex, age, and ecological conditions), and (4) linkedthese mechanismsto the story features that trigger them. This comprehensive framework lays the ground for a theory-driven research program for the study of fictional stories, their content, distribution, structure, andculturalevolution