Conspiracy thinking and digital media: Disentangling a complex relationship.

Despite conspiracy theories being seemingly omnipresent, not least on digital media, the relationship between digital media and conspiracy thinking is more complex than is often assumed.

Based on the distinction between conspiracy mindset and beliefs in specific conspiracy theories, this project aims to disentangle the longitudinal relationship between digital media and media use on the one hand, and conspiracy mindset and beliefs in specific conspiracy theories on the other.

Toward this end, this project will apply a multi-method mixed research design, integrating a panel survey, survey-based experiments, computational methods, and discourse analysis to investigate the following overarching questions:(1) What is the longitudinal relationship between different types of digital media use and (a) conspiracy mindset and (b beliefs in specific conspiracy theories?(2) What characterizes conspiratorial language use in digital mainstream media, political alternative media, and social media, and what roles do these different settings play in enabling or mitigating conspiratorial language use?(3) How are conspiracy mindset and beliefs in specific conspiracy theories triggered by exposure to conspiracy theories in digital media?To answer these questions, the project will be carried out over four years by a team of three scholars specialized on the different methods involved.

The timeline and personnel costs are justified by the scope of the data gathering and analysis in the project.