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Record W4383818070 · doi:10.1515/for-2023-2022

Conspiracy Theories in the US: Who Believes in Them?

2023· article· en· W4383818070 on OpenAlexaff
Daniel Stockemer

Bibliographic record

VenueThe Forum · 2023
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicMisinformation and Its Impacts
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Ottawa
Fundersnot available
KeywordsMindsetRealmIdeologyPoliticsSocial psychologyPolitical philosophySociologyPsychologyPolitical scienceLawSocial scienceEpistemology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract Conspiracy theories have become an increasingly important part of the political realm especially in the United States. More than 30 % of citizens either strongly or somewhat believe in QAnon, the Birther or the Truther conspiracy to name a few of these theories. In this article, I provide an overview of conspiracy theory beliefs and evaluate the factors that make people more likely to believe in such theories. With the help of an original survey comprising 1000 residents in the US, I detect that there is not necessarily a conspirational mindset. While low education, a right-wing ideology seem to increase beliefs in conspiracy theories throughout the board, the effects of other indicators including populist attitudes, low self-esteem and age tend differ based on the conspiracy theory under investigation.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.004
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.016
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.017
Threshold uncertainty score0.035

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0040.016
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.001
Science and technology studies0.0020.003
Scholarly communication0.0020.001
Open science0.0000.001
Research integrity0.0010.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0040.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.038
GPT teacher head0.335
Teacher spread0.297 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations5
Published2023
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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