Conspiracy theories fuel prejudice towards minority groups
By: News Archive
Exposure to conspiracy theories can intensify prejudice towards minority groups according to new research from the University of East Anglia.
Researchers from UEA, the University of Staffordshire and the University of Kent carried out three studies to examine the effect of exposure to conspiracy theories on people’s attitudes towards minority groups.
In the first study, participants were exposed to one of three stories - a conspiracy story about immigrants’ involvement in terrorist organisations and their plots to attack Britain from within, an anti-conspiracy narrative or a neutral narrative.
When tested afterwards, participants who had been exposed to the conspiracy story held more conspiracy beliefs and expressed more prejudice towards immigrants.
In the second and third studies, participants were again exposed to pro-conspiracy, anti-conspiracy or neutral information. This time it concerned Jewish people, and the participants in both studies who had been exposed to the pro-conspiracy story held more conspiracy beliefs and expressed more prejudice towards Jewish people.
Participants also completed a measure to gauge their feelings towards a number of other groups, such as people of different nationalities, ethnicities and social position.
The researchers found that the participants who had been exposed to the anti-Jewish conspiracy material expressed greater prejudice towards these other groups as well as towards Jewish people.
The first study involved 166 participants (96 women, 70 men), the second had 173 participants (81 women, 88 men, four other) and the third involved 114 participants (50 women, 61 men, three other).
Dr Rose Meleady, from UEA’s School of Psychology, said: “This research highlights the potentially harmful consequences of exposure to conspiracy theories. If a conspiracy theory implicates a certain minority group, there is a risk that we not only come to believe the conspiracy but that it also creates prejudice towards the group in question. Prejudice attitudes can then spread to other, related groups creating a general pattern of intolerance.”
Dr Daniel Jolley, from Staffordshire University, said: “Our research has demonstrated that exposure to conspiracy theories about groups can increase prejudice and discrimination. This effect has been established in two contexts: with immigrants and with Jewish people.
“Exposure to intergroup conspiracy theories can also lead to a more general effect. We showed that Jewish conspiracy theories led to increased prejudice towards other groups.
“Our research suggests that conspiracy theories can have a widespread negative impact on intergroup relations, though further research is needed to measure how persistent this effect is.
“We would suggest that efforts to reduce prejudice and defuse negative intergroup relations should, therefore, consider the contribution of popular and pervasive conspiracy theories.”
‘Exposure to intergroup conspiracy theories promotes prejudice which spreads across groups’ is published in the British Psychological Society’s British Journal of Psychology on March 14, 2019.
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