What Do Conspiracy Theories Do to Us?

New York Magazine:

Conspiracy theories are all around us. Sometimes they’re relatively harmless — concerns about Roswell aliens aren’t having a major effect on public policy — and sometimes they’re not: Something like 37 percent of Americans believe that anthropogenic climate change is a hoax, which has a pretty disastrous effect on the U.S.’s ability to contribute meaningfully to a potentially catastrophic problem.

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The author, Princeton University researcher Dr. Sander van der Linden, recruited 316 Amazon Mechanical Turk volunteers, who were divided into three groups: One watched a clip from a film arguing that concerns over global warming are actually part of a global conspiracy, one watched a U.N. video seeking to raise awareness of the threat it poses, and a third, the control group, were asked to solve a “neutral word puzzle.”

Read the whole story: New York Magazine