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Who Dares Call it Conspiracy? (Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre)
95 Plays1 year ago
Time for some psychological experimentation, as we look at Michael J. Wood's Some Dare Call It Conspiracy: Labeling Something a Conspiracy Theory Does Not Reduce Belief in It. In addition, Josh eats his dinner over the course of the entire recording and refuses to edit out any of his slurping and chewing sounds - you could see this as an intense lack of professionalism, but we prefer to think of it as some extra ASMR, free of charge. We're so good to you.
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Transcript
Pun on 'None Dare Call It Conspiracy'
00:00:00
Speaker
So, today's Masterpiece Theatre is an almost pun on the book None Dear Call It Conspiracy, which doesn't make me wonder why no one's written a book on ecclesiastical conspiracy theories called None's Dear Call It Conspiracy. That's… that's quite clever. I know. Then there's the bakery conspiracy theory cookbook Bun's Dear Call It Conspiracy. The NRA PR book Gun's Dear Call It Conspiracy. The Landlord Handbook Slung's Dear Call It Conspiracy.
00:00:29
Speaker
A book on the cost of living crisis. Bums, dare call it, conspiracy. Yeah, it could also be the title of your sex day. Indeed. So, anything else? No. I just want to make a joke about nuns that doesn't obviously come from the mind of a rampant transphobe. Now that would be a no. Just no.
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:54
Speaker
The podcast's guide to the conspiracy featuring Josh Edison and Em Dent.
00:01:05
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy in Auckland, New Zealand. I am Josh Edison and in Zhuhai, China, we have Dr. M.R.X.Denteth. What are you eating, Dr. Denteth? Nothing? I am eating, well, I mean, I could, I actually could start snacking down on a Nashy pear if you really want some crisp citrus sounds.
00:01:27
Speaker
Right, I say that because at some point we're going to pause recording, which you will not know because it'll be edited out, when my wife gets home with Wendy's for dinner, and I'm gonna be eating it while we record, and I apologize for nothing. All the sounds of slurping and mastication, I'm gonna leave it all in, and you're just gonna live with it. Josh, have you ever apologized for anything in your life? Never.
00:01:55
Speaker
I make no apologies for the fact that I've never apologized. I think maybe you should rethink your fundamental ethical paradigm. Possibly I should, but we'll get into that later. First, we need to look at a paper and you've done it again. You've gone outside, outside the box, as it were. Now we're doing, we're doing psychology. This is an experiment. This is an actual, it's two experiments. It's like methodology and statistical stuff.
00:02:25
Speaker
And at least one graph. There's a graph. Yeah, I'm really not sure how I feel about all of this. But do you have anything else before we get into the main episode?
Suspicious Emails and Click Reluctance
00:02:36
Speaker
Yes, so to the listener of the show who has been emailing the podcast email address repeatedly with an anonymous email account with a shortened URL, I'm not clicking the URL, not knowing how it's going to resolve. So whoever is trying to send me a link,
00:02:57
Speaker
if you could send the link with an unshortened URL so I can actually see what it's linking to because shortened URLs are very suspicious. So please do get in contact if it's a really important thing. Now let me just actually count the number of emails that have gone into the podcast account. All right, so
00:03:18
Speaker
twice on Monday, once on Wednesday, once today, and I go back to last week, yeah, four times over the weekend. Different email addresses every time, same link. Just, you know, send an unshortened URL.
00:03:33
Speaker
So it was what? Twice on Monday, once on Wednesday, twice on Tuesday and four times the week before. It could also be the title of your sextape. Four times on the weekend. Definitely the title of my sextape.
Study on Conspiracy Theory Labeling
00:03:45
Speaker
Right. Anyway, so enough prurience. Shall we review a paper? We shall indeed. Josh, some dare call it a conspiracy theory masterpiece theatre. Indeed.
00:04:02
Speaker
Right, as chance would have it, my Wendy's arrived just in time for us to put in a chime and go to the expert. So here we go. I haven't drunk enough for it to make nice bottling noises. There we go. Just so you know, I'm eating a hamburger and drinking Coke and eating fries, as all professional podcasters do when they podcast. But what are we podcasting about?
00:04:27
Speaker
That's the question. It's a conspiracy theory masterpiece theatre. Some dare call it conspiracy. Labelling something a conspiracy theory does not reduce belief in it by Michael J. Wood or Mike to his friends, published in political psychology, volume 37, number five, back in the halcyon days of 2016.
00:04:47
Speaker
Now this isn't the first time we've heard from one Michael J. Wood. Possibly this is the first of his solo papers we've looked at, but certainly the stuff he's done with Karen Douglas we have referred to, if not looked at specifically. I don't recall what we haven't done in conspiracy theory masterpiece theatre, but he's a name who is known to us. Yes, and he's Canadian. Now whether that means anything is another matter entirely.
00:05:13
Speaker
So yeah, Josh, normally this is the point in time where you try to read the abstract, but as you're trying to eat, I think I should read the abstract at this time. It's a responsible thing to do. It is. I feel I should read the abstract whilst also eating.
00:05:30
Speaker
Unfortunately, I have... I do have a Nashy peer to hand, but it's quite hard to eat a peer and crunch and eat an abstract at the same time. You've got food on my mind, Josh. You've got food on my mind. Enough of this. Abstract. I'll just kick something at the same time. This is a very professional episode of the podcast. This is so professional.
00:05:52
Speaker
The fact that he's enduring it, I think is actually making it less professional with every second. Even I feel the need to be as unprofessional as possible.
00:06:02
Speaker
Conspiracy theory is widely acknowledged to be a loaded term. Politicians use it to mock and dismiss allegations against them, while philosophers and political scientists warn that it could be used as a rhetorical weapon to pathologise dissent. In two empirical studies conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk, I present an initial examination of whether this concern is justified.
00:06:25
Speaker
In Experiment 1, 150 participants judged a list of historical and speculative theories to be less likely when they were labeled conspiracy theories than when they were labeled ideas. In Experiment 2, registration number N5802, participants who read a news article about fictitious corruption allegations endorsed those allegations no more than participants who saw them labeled conspiracy theories.
00:06:53
Speaker
The lack of an effect of the conspiracy theory label in both experiments was unexpected and may be due to a romanticized image of conspiracy theories in popular media or a dilution of the term to include mundane speculation regarding corruption and political intrigue.
00:07:11
Speaker
Indeed. Now, I do have to point out you missed a no there. In experiment one, you said they judged a list of historical and speculative theories to be less likely when they labeled conspiracy theories instead of saying they were no less likely, which does... Josh, I don't point out when you misread the abstract. Normally, and fair, and normally I wouldn't, but I just thought because that one actually gave the exact opposite
00:07:36
Speaker
of what it actually was. It maybe was a correction. Unless you're willing to roll back the tape and point out to me the point where I made that error, I say that's fake news. Well, fair enough.
00:07:48
Speaker
In that case, let's get into the paper. It has an introductory section, which is so boring. All of these papers have introductory sections. It's so bourgeois. Yes, it's not actually called introduction, though. It seems terribly gauche, but that's fine. It begins.
00:08:09
Speaker
Since the mid-1990s, a growing psychological research tradition has generated a great deal of knowledge about the antecedents and consequences of beliefs and conspiracy theories. The term conspiracy theory itself, however, has received little explicit attention in the psychological literature, despite considerable interest from philosophers and political scientists in its precise meaning and implications.
00:08:31
Speaker
Quoting, referring here to Bratich, Cody, de Haven Smith, Husting, and Orr, most of whom are names we've heard before. It continues, calling something a conspiracy theory or someone a conspiracy theorist is seen as an act of rhetorical violence, a way of dismissing reasonable suspicion as irrational paranoia.
00:08:50
Speaker
For de Haven-Smith in 2013, the conspiracy theory label comes with such negative baggage that applying it has, quote, the effect of dismissing conspiratorial suspicions out of hand with no discussion whatsoever. Hustigan-Orr, 2007, likewise argued that applying the label, quote, discredits specific explanations for social and historical events regardless of the quality or quantity of evidence.
00:09:13
Speaker
Bifid, 2011, has lamented what he sees as a broadening of the meaning of conspiracy theories in recent decades. While the term once-targeted speculation about secretive cabals controlling the course of world affairs, it has come to include broader discourses of suspicion, such as routine mistrust of authority and concerns about the digital panopticon.
00:09:31
Speaker
Josh, one question. Yes.
Has the Scope of Conspiracy Theories Widened?
00:09:34
Speaker
In the second, in the first sentence, you said a word which whose pronunciation I found intriguing. Do you say antecedents? Yeah. There you go. Pronunciation. I'm not going to look it up. I'm going to assume we're both right. So we could maybe talk a little bit about this bifur business about is it a bad thing that the term conspiracy theory has been
00:10:01
Speaker
widened, but that's not really, doesn't really fall under most of, that doesn't really concern most of what's in the paper. But was it ever just about secretive Cavals, the term conspiracy theory? I mean, life at work is interesting, say, choking myself to death, having just swallowed and thus somehow at my advanced age, swallowing now restricts my ability to breathe.
00:10:29
Speaker
Let me just recover my breath there. The Bifid's work is interesting. I had a mouth full of coke there. Swallowing impacts my ability to breathe. Title of your sex tag. Continue. Yeah, Jovan Bifid's work is interesting in that he gets, like Michael Barkun, cited quite a lot. And Bifid is fascinating because Bifid does make some weird claims about the history of conspiracy theory.
00:11:00
Speaker
So I'm always a little bit skeptical when it comes to referring to Bifid, given I think that Bifid's history of the label conspiracy theory is a little bit ahistorical. But for the general question, you know, what has it meant? I mean, if you look at the work of, say, Joe Yusinski and Joe Parent's in American conspiracy theories, the label does seem to be remarkably stable over the course of the 20th century.
00:11:30
Speaker
It seems that what might have changed in recent history is the media have started using the term conspiracy theory to almost refer to any kind of weird belief. So there's a big, big debate in the literature. Should we call flat earth beliefs conspiracy theories? Because there's nothing inherently conspiratorial about the flat earth hypothesis.
00:11:56
Speaker
There are just certain versions of the flat earth hypothesis that bring in the claim that NASA is involved in a cover up to hide the fact that the earth is flat. So you can be a flat earther and not believe there's a conspiracy.
00:12:11
Speaker
And so there's this worry that maybe the media uses the term in an overly broad way, which is weakening the meaning. But at any rate, the introduction continues by most accounts for the majority of people. The center of the conspiracy theory category, the prototypical conspiracy theory, is seen as unfounded, paranoid, and silly, again referring to Braditch 2008, to Haven Smith 2010 and 2013, and Husting in Law 2007.
00:12:39
Speaker
And this is a very weird reading of those authors. So particularly to Harvin Smith and Marty and Jenna, I mean, yes, they are often talking about the fact that people talk about conspiracy theories as unfounded, paranoid and silly. But the way that Mike is categorizing it here, it's as if that's what they're arguing for.
00:13:08
Speaker
as opposed to what they're actually arguing against. Jack's account is slightly more tricky in that it's a cultural study, media studies thing, which is largely agnostic about the valence of the term conspiracy theory and more its functional role in society. But yes, this is a weird reading of those four authors.
00:13:32
Speaker
Nevertheless, it carries on. To that end, the present study sought to determine whether the conspiracy theory label is damaging to an idea's credibility, and if so, what some possible mechanisms might be. In the first of two experiments, I hypothesised that both speculative conspiracy theories and real historical conspiracies would seem less likely when conspiracy theories than when called ideas. When called conspiracy theories than when called ideas. See, now I correct myself.
00:13:59
Speaker
This podcast is going downhill very quickly. Well, that's what food does for you. Normally I'm seconds from death from starvation when we record these ones, but now I have a full stomach and it's leaking out in all sorts of strange ways. So there's a bit more to the introduction, but that sums things up. And then it starts getting into the details of the particular experiments that were performed.
Experiment 1: Historical and Speculative Cases
00:14:26
Speaker
So experiment one had 150 participants sourced from Amazon Mechanical Turk, which I gather is a site where people just sort of sign up randomly. You can just chuck in surveys and things like that and people will randomly sign up.
00:14:44
Speaker
And it seems to be a good way of sourcing or anonymous. So I believe Amazon Mechanical Turk, you get paid a nominal thing. He does mention a small thing, I think, at least one of the experience. Yeah, which.
00:14:59
Speaker
some people think is kind of problematic because there's a standard problem in a lot of surveys in psychology, in that psychologists either end up surveying their students, which means you end up surveying a cohort which have roughly uniform beliefs, usually middle class people doing psychology degrees at literally prestigious colleges around the world.
00:15:26
Speaker
all you do is via things like Mechanical Turk, which also means you have people who don't need to work, because the kind of people who can spend an afternoon doing surveys on, say, Amazon Mechanical Turk, not the kind of people who have to go out and work a nine to five job and then go home and prepare their meal. They're the kind of people who have
00:15:49
Speaker
another spare time that they can booz about the internet doing surveys. So there's worries that these processes by which people are surveying people are bringing in a certain amount of biases. Now, there are ways to kind of mitigate against that.
00:16:08
Speaker
But even so, there's a fair amount of skepticism by other social scientists about solely relying on surveys using these online tools. Yes, but at any rate, they picked 150, well, when I say picked, they received 150 anonymous participants who were then divided at random into two separate groups.
00:16:33
Speaker
And the experiment asked them to write the likeliness on a scale of one to five of statements that for one group were called ideas, and for the other group were explicitly called conspiracy theories. Now, these statements were a mixture of sort of generally conspiratorial statements from what is known as the generic conspiracist beliefs scale or the GCV.
00:16:59
Speaker
which are things like how likely is the idea slash conspiracy theory that the government permits or perpetrates acts of terrorism upon its own soil, disguising its involvement. So how likely are false flags? But they also had what they called confirmed historical conspiracies, which were things like MKUltra. How likely is it that? And would then describe things that we actually know historical facts.
00:17:26
Speaker
And so the results, the results of this experiment, once all 150 results came in, were that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the historical examples were rated as being more likely than the ones from the GCB, but that there was no significant difference between the group where things were called ideas and the group where things were called conspiracy theories.
00:17:50
Speaker
So in the discussion of this experiment, it begins, experiment one did not find the hypothesized effects, calling something a conspiracy theory failed to have any effect on people's evaluation of it. This was an unexpected result and it runs counter to a long-standing assumption both within and outside academia. However, it is possible that participants had simply already made their minds up about well-known historical conspiracies and the general topics covered in the GCB, and were therefore unlikely to change their responses based solely on question wording.
00:18:20
Speaker
If this is so, the effect of calling something a conspiracy theory may only be detectable if the label is applied to something that the participant does not yet have a strong opinion on. Participants might have their own opinion on whether a particular proposition is best described as a conspiracy theory, one which is not overruled by the category label provided by the stimulus materials.
00:18:39
Speaker
So yes, having found a result that was not what they were expecting, I keep saying they, this is Michael Wood, I don't know if these sorts of things you have assistance in it as a group effort or whether I should just be saying he. But at any rate, the discussion is then basically some possible suggestions for how to account for this not finding the results that they're expecting.
00:19:02
Speaker
Um, also suggested the idea that perhaps if the label conspiracy theory does have negative connotations, it isn't uniformly negative for everyone. Some people who are sort of more, a bit more, more, uh, conspiracisty and more have a more, have a worldview that's more tolerant of conspiracy theories.
00:19:22
Speaker
will be less averse to hearing something described as a conspiracy theory and also the idea that people with this more conspiracist worldview or possibly people who have heard of these historical conspiracy theories and know that they are actual things might therefore be more likely to countenance other ones that they haven't heard from before.
00:19:44
Speaker
So it offers up a few potential explanations, but this idea that perhaps if it's something you've already made up your mind on, then it's not going to matter what it gets called. So maybe it needs to be something that they haven't heard of before.
00:20:00
Speaker
which I think is what leads him to experiment two. Did you have anything else before we move along to experiment two? I mean, I'm saving my major thoughts for the very end because, spoilers, Martin Orr, Juno Hosting and myself have written a reply to this paper which is forthcoming.
00:20:25
Speaker
Okay. All right. Then we'll just go on to
Experiment 2: Fictional Canadian Scandal
00:20:28
Speaker
experiment two. This was a large one. It had 802 participants who were again divided at random into two separate groups. One group was asked about something that got referred to as conspiracy theories, whereas the other group, the same things were simply referred to as corruption allegations. So the summary of experiment two is
00:20:49
Speaker
The manipulation comprised a short mock news article about a fictitious political scandal in Canada. This particular subject matter was chosen to reduce the chance that participants in the US sample would have a strong opinion on the veracity of the claims or be able to immediately recognize the news story as made up.
00:21:05
Speaker
The body of the article was the same for all participants and described the ruling Conservative Party's denial of accusations that they had misappropriated public money to fund a recent re-election campaign. In the experimental condition, the headline was, conspiracy theories emerge in wake of Canadian election result. In the control condition, the words, conspiracy theories were replaced by corruption allegations. The article was presented in a realistic-looking news website template and was accompanied by an image of Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
00:21:34
Speaker
That's then Prime Minister Stephen Harper. So again, on a scale from one not at all to seven very much, participants were asked to rate the degree to which they thought the accusations against the Canadian government were likely plausible, convincing with considering interesting and coherent.
00:21:53
Speaker
So now now we have a fully fictional example. So this is guaranteed to be something that they haven't heard of before. Well, I mean, that's the assumption. So Mike is assuming that Americans don't know much about their neighbors in the north. And this is an interesting assumption to make, because
00:22:13
Speaker
Most of us non-Americans do kind of think of Americans as being pretty ignorant about things outside of their local towns, given that there are many humorous TikTok and YouTube videos of Americans not being able to point out where other states in the union are located with reference to themselves, let alone where other countries in the world are located.
00:22:39
Speaker
But there are some people who have gone, this is a dangerous assumption to make here, that you can use Canadian conspiracy theories as a proxy for something that Americans know nothing about. And especially using election conspiracy theories about a near neighbor. Because sure, maybe Americans don't know much about Canadian politics.
00:23:05
Speaker
But it's very hard to deny that most Americans know that one of their closest neighbors is a country called Canada to the north, which is a democracy just like themselves. So there's some worry here that the assumption that they can use that I'm now I'm using they in the same way you're using them the same way that Mike is assuming that Americans won't know much about Canadian politics. It's
00:23:30
Speaker
It's an assumption which the more you product it, the more you go, it's a dangerous thing to assume. But nevertheless, the results were basically the same as in experiment one. There was not a statistically significant difference in how willing people were to endorse the story between the conspiracy theory group and the corruption allegations group. And so again, there's then a discussion on what to make of this.
00:23:58
Speaker
As in experiment one, the hypothesis that the conspiracy theory label would result in attenuated belief was not supported. Even when someone's very first exposure to an allegation of political corruption is seeing it branded as a conspiracy theory, they're no less likely to take it seriously than if it is instead called a corruption allegation.
00:24:16
Speaker
Moreover, the anticipated moderation effect failed to materialise, even though people with more conspiracist worldviews generally took the allegations more seriously, the conspiracy theory label was just as powerless for conspiracy believers as it was for conspiracy skeptics. There was likewise no statistical difference between conditions when limiting analysis to only those people who answered the comprehension question correctly.
00:24:38
Speaker
At this point there is a graph. You know how I feel about it. A graph is just a diagram with numbers attached to it. And you know how I feel about diagrams in papers. It's like looking at the twin towers being built. You get two towers and then they're slightly larger and one slightly larger than the other one because it's being built faster. And then the other one gets built slightly faster again and it's slightly taller. What is your
00:25:05
Speaker
Is this supposed to make me feel more comfortable looking at this diagram to make it think of the worst terrorist attack on American soil? Yes. Right. Does it? A little bit, yeah.
00:25:20
Speaker
Anyway, after the graph, there are again more ideas about why this could be. One thing that's brought up is the idea that people might be more willing to accept conspiracy theories, quote, when conspiracy theorizing allows them to attribute malfeasance to out-group members. In other words, that seems implying that, say, you're a
00:25:42
Speaker
a left-winger, you're more likely to believe conspiracy theories that say right-wingers did something evil and vice versa. Again, these are all things that are just sort of brought up as suggestions, as possible mechanisms that could be going on here. And this is developed a little bit further in the final general discussion section.
Why Labeling May Not Affect Belief
00:26:05
Speaker
And this begins.
00:26:07
Speaker
Two experiments found no evidence of a negative effect of calling something a conspiracy theory. Experiment one showed no evidence that the label had any effect on endorsement of general conspiracist views or beliefs in real historical conspiracies, and experiment two failed to find an effect with a fictitious political scandal previously unknown to participants and a large enough sample to detect a small effect with 80% power. Of course, it is possible that a weak effect of the label exists and was not detected, or that the effect is contingent upon some circumstances not met by the study materials.
00:26:37
Speaker
Yet such an effect would be a small and slippery one. Title of your sex tape? Maybe.
00:26:45
Speaker
not reliably elicited even with a large sample in a blank slate of a political scandal to work on. The effect failed to show itself even among those who paid close attention to the stimulus materials, and there was no evidence that an overall negative view of conspiracy theories rendered the label any more effective and discouraging belief. Taken together, contrary to de Harven-Smith and Husting and Orr, experiments 1 and 2 suggest that the conspiracy theory label possesses far less rhetorical power than previously assumed.
00:27:12
Speaker
Then some more points. There's a suggestion that these days, conspiracy theories may have more positive connotations and that this may cancel out some of the stigma against it. Quoting a paper by the two Joes from 2014, which is the idea that
00:27:33
Speaker
I guess increasingly popular culture shows conspiracy theories a bit sort of glamorous if you look at what's a good example. We've been through millions of them on conspiracy theories and popular culture. Well, it's important to note that this paper is published in 2016, so presumably written in 2015.
00:27:56
Speaker
pop culture phenomena of the conspiracy theorists who turned out to be right upon investigating their theories is something which was popular then. I don't know that if Mike was writing the paper today, he would say that conspiracy theories have positive connotations in the year of our Lord 2023. I don't know. I mean, you can think of things like The Matrix or whatever. We're the heroes of the people who know the
00:28:24
Speaker
the truth that's being kept from everyone else and stuff like that. So that's one idea at any rate. He also points out that it's possible, and this obviously isn't something explored by these two experiments, that there's a difference in how conspiracy theories are viewed
00:28:41
Speaker
versus how conspiracy theorists are viewed. So maybe conspiracy theories might be, people might be more okay with that, but it's conspiracy theorists that are viewed negatively. And they're again, referring to sort of popular culture where the character of the conspiracy theorists still tends to be your stereotypical tinfoil hat type person.
00:29:06
Speaker
So maybe there is still a bit of a stigma, but it's more around the people and hasn't rubbed off on the theories themselves. And then there's a bunch of talk about exactly the mechanism of how labeling something might affect a person's perception of it, which is a little bit unclear as well. And the whole thing finishes up.
00:29:31
Speaker
Finally, it is possible that the conspiracy theory label has simply lost some of the power that it once had. While the effectiveness of the manipulation may not have been moderated by beliefs in conspiracy theories, it is quite possible that even people who are skeptical of the sorts of conspiracy theories mentioned in the GCB are sympathetic to the idea of conspiracies in general. Perhaps the conspiracy theory label's common meaning extends beyond the subject matter of the GCB to include general speculation about political intrigue.
00:29:58
Speaker
Byford's concern about the dilution of the term may be well-founded. As the cases of David Cameron discussed in Helm and Boffee 2011 and Chris Christie discussed in Benin 2014 demonstrate, the label is sometimes used defensively by politicians to associate relatively mundane suspicions with fanciful speculation about world-controlling cabals. Rather than putting those suspicions to rest, this tactic may instead have caused a re-evaluation of the label itself. For many, it may have prompted the question of whether conspiracy theories might be on the right track after all.
00:30:28
Speaker
Which is an interesting point. I mean, this is something we've talked about plenty. The problem of people in power labelling criticism as a conspiracy theory as a way to just try and diffuse it. Does that end up people, make people think, maybe there is something to these conspiracy theories after all? I don't know. So you told me, so you mentioned spoilers before in the idea that you have
00:30:52
Speaker
You're publishing a follow-up to this. I assume you have an opinion or two on this paper? I do. So Madi Jenner and myself talked about this paper a lot because this paper gets cited a lot. There's a reason why it's in the Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre series. It's a very, very well-cited paper.
00:31:15
Speaker
And Marti and Jina have always been slightly annoyed by it because they feel that would kind of misrepresent their research. And given that part of the motivation for his research, it's tilting against the claim that Marti and Jina made. We felt it was time to write a reply. And this reply is interesting.
00:31:35
Speaker
Because we're not saying Wood is necessarily wrong. We're saying that Wood is conflating two problems and decides that the results of his surveys answer both problems when really they only answer one of them.
00:31:52
Speaker
So we have a paper called, does the phrase conspiracy theory matter coming out in society? It should be out late this year, beginning of next year. I'm simply waiting on funding from my university to pay the open access fee. So be free to read for everyone.
00:32:11
Speaker
And I'm just going to give you a very brief excerpt paraphrased from the beginning of the paper to explain our kind of gentle criticism of Wood here. So it goes like
Critique of Wood's Study
00:32:26
Speaker
this. This is from the second section of our paper.
00:32:29
Speaker
When we consider the label conspiracy theory, we sometimes ask, do people believe these things called conspiracy theories? Whilst at other times we ask, does the label conspiracy theory affect whether people are willing to take up or admit to belief in conspiracy theories?
00:32:46
Speaker
The first question is about believability. If something is labeled a conspiracy theory, does that make people more or less inclined to believe it? If I label the view that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone in killing President Kennedy as a conspiracy theory, does this affect whether people will adopt that view as a belief?
00:33:08
Speaker
The second question is about rhetoric. Does the label conspiracy theory affect whether people are willing to admit to belief in or even consideration of a given conspiracy theory? That is, if other people call the view that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone in killing President Kennedy a conspiracy theory, does this make me more or less inclined to admit that I believe it?
00:33:34
Speaker
Wood's two surveys test whether the label conspiracy theory changed respondent's belief in a conspiracy theory and found no evidence that he did. He was, in effect, considering believability. That is, the label, according to Wood, has no interactional or discursive power. Wood, however, was also challenging work by researchers who were motivated to investigate the rhetorical power of the label.
00:34:00
Speaker
Wood's work then was motivated as a means of further testing a claim which was about rhetoric and not believability that other researchers had previously investigated both theoretically and crucially empirically. This is a problem as Wood shifts the goalposts from talk about the rhetorical power of the label to its role in diminishing belief.
00:34:24
Speaker
So our worry with Wood's findings and the way that they've been adopted by other researchers is that it might be the case that labeling something a conspiracy theory doesn't affect the belief when you survey individual conspiracy theories amongst respondents.
00:34:42
Speaker
But other researchers were more concerned about what is the rhetorical power of people in positions of power labeling things as conspiracy theories in societal discourse? If you label something as a conspiracy theory and you're a person with a position of power, does it have the effect of kind of quashing people's willingness to admit in public debate these things labeled as conspiracy theories?
00:35:10
Speaker
Interesting. Oh, well, maybe we should say that the paper is written. Is it available? And soon and soon it will be published very soon, maybe within a month, maybe within two months, but definitely by the beginning of next year. Right. So it has gone through peer review. It has been accepted for publication. I just need to send in the open access fee, which is
00:35:35
Speaker
about 2,700 U.S. Smackaroos, which is why I'm waiting on my university to release those funds, because I don't have 2,700 U.S. Smackaroos just sitting around in a bank account that I can just spend willy-nilly. I need the university to
00:35:54
Speaker
engage in a little bit of capitalism and give me that money, but once that money is in my account, or the promissory note that says the money will be within my account within a few weeks, open access fee will be paid, and article will come out. Coincidentally, 2700 US smackaroos is the title of my sex tape, but they said the better. The sub-type of your sex tape is a very red bottom. What?
00:36:23
Speaker
2,700 US Smackeroos are very red bottom. Well, that depends what you mean by a Smackeroo. But yes, so I did have a train of thought. Strangely, it's been derailed. But no, basically, interesting Josh, boons bum. I do. But that's my problem, not yours. Interesting paper. It was interesting to see, you know, coming in with a hypothesis and finding it quite
00:36:51
Speaker
quite soundly disproven, but then, as you say, was the hypothesis and the conclusions reached actually what we all thought it was. So I think that, yeah, I'd be interested to read the follow-up to this then and see how the two map onto one another.
00:37:13
Speaker
But of course we won't be reading it on this podcast as we don't cover conspiracy theory masterpiece theatres that involve me. Well obviously no, the very idea is madness itself. So before things get the better of it, I finished eating a while ago by the way.
00:37:31
Speaker
And unfortunately, my drink got upsized, and there's way more than I can actually do. I was hoping to reach the bottom of it by the time we got to the end of the podcast, so I could do lots of... Reaching the bottom of it is the title of your sex tape. Yeah, look, hang on. Can I just... Well, so we need to stop this type of your sex tape thing. It's very open for 9.99, and as we know, ACAB.
00:37:57
Speaker
Well, it's gone off the air now, so someone has to take up the mantle. Ah, that's a tough time for your six-take! Roger Anderson in taking it up the mantle.
00:38:11
Speaker
Yeah, that's a bit of a reach. Also title of your sex tape. Now, but before we go off and record one another's respective sex tapes, we do, of course, need to record a bonus episode for our patrons, which will continue.
Closing Remarks and Bonus Episode Tease
00:38:25
Speaker
The sex tapes are not for our patrons.
00:38:27
Speaker
It depends what level of patronage. I'm sure an arrangement could be come to. We can add a new tier for that. But they'll just have to deal with a regular old bonus episode for this week at the very least, where we will talk about a bit of Trumpy news, a bit of local politics news, and then a bit of podcast news. Because if there's one thing people who listen to podcasts like, it's listening to people talk about other podcasts other than the ones they're actually listening to.
00:38:57
Speaker
It's true. They love it. I love your sex tape. Now, before things get out of hand, I think I think I really think we better draw a line in this and draw things to a close, indeed, by me saying goodbye. Goodbye. The podcasts guide to the conspiracy stars, Josh Addison and myself.
00:39:23
Speaker
Associate Professor M.R.X. Stentors. Our show's cons... sorry, producers are Tom and Philip, plus another mysterious anonymous donor. You can contact Josh and myself at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com, and please do consider joining our Patreon. And remember, they're coming to get you, Barbara.