Conspiracy Theories, Quantum Social Science, and the Political Power of Irrelevant Beliefs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Objectives Recent psychological research into conspiracy theories (CTs) has explored the possible relationships between antecedents or predisposed mindsets as explanations of increased rates of CT belief and tested the increased susceptibility to cognitive fallacies among CT believers. This literature provides an interesting set of social‐psychological insights for the analysis of the political significance of CTs. What has received less direct attention from political scientists is the role of how apparently politically irrelevant CTs impact political discourse. Methods This study uses a digital ethnography and media scan to apply quantum cognition theory to the invocation of CTs in politically‐relevant scenarios. Results The article argues that politically irrelevant CTs can be politically powerful through their impact on future cognitive processes. Conclusion Future research at the intersection of quantum social science and the study of CTs may provide new analytical tools and theoretical approaches.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".