Lecture 8 - Extremism and Conspiracy belief Flashcards
Factors that explain extremism (Krouwel en Prooijen 2019)
- Psychological distress stimulates extreme ideological outlook
- Extremists have relatively simplistic, black-and-white perception of social world
- this mental simplicity makes extremists overconfident in their judgements
- Extremists are less tolerant of different groups and opinions than moderates
–> increase likelihood of inter-group conflict
Rigidity-of-the-right-model
- Left and right differ in cognitive style
- Right wing = more closed minded
Mental and cognitive simplicity
- Extremists adopt a simplistic, black-and-white perseption of the social world.
Belief superiority
(over) confidence that one accurately understands reality (better than others) –> Political extremists
Consequences of being extremist (crippled espistemology of extremism) Hardin 2002
- Rigidity, closed-mindedness
- Belief in simple solutions to complext social problems
- Functional to cope with uncertainty and fear
- Compensatory conviction (MC Gregor, 2006)
Epistemic clarity
- Having a clear understanding of the evidence, reasons, and logic that support our beliefs and being able to articulate them clearly and coherently
- Fear and uncertainty make people look for epistemic clarity, and thus conspiracy theories
- Brain becomes pattern seeking (shermer, 2012)
Polarization, partisanship and junk news consumption over social media in the us (2018)
- on Twitter, trump supporters share the most junk news and circulates more junk than all the other groups
- On FB, extreme hard right pages share the most junk news and the other groups
- On average, Twitter shares more junk news than audiences of Facebook’s public pages
Junk news
- Professionalism: do not employ the journalism practices, lack transparency
- Style: emotionally driven
- Credibility: Rely on false info, no fact-checking
- Bias: Highly biased and ideologically skewed
- Counterfeit: Stylistically disguised as news
Trump supporters and fake news results
- Trump supporters play a key role in junk news dissemination.
- Trump supporters and conservative media group share the widest range of junk sources on Twitter.
- Trump supporters contribute more to the dissemination of junk news, compared to all other groups put together. –> Trump supporters exist in their own information bubble.
Heterophily links article Narayan et al (2018)
Links found between:
- Democratic party group vs. mainstream media
- Democratic party s. progressive movement vs. resistance groups
- Republican party group vs. conservative media group
- Republican party group vs. trum supporters
- Democratics vs. other left
- Hard conservative vs. Libertarians
- Republican party vs. hard conservative
- Republican party vs. republican party
Facebook polarisation results
- hard conservatives have high coverage and consistency
Typical right wing prejudice
- Against muslims, immigrants, homosexuals, gypsies, unemployed, ‘bureaucrats’, intellectuals, environmentalists
Typical left wing prejudice
- Christians, bankers, business people, hunters, military/police
Both right and left extremistst are more likely to:
- Believe in conspiracies than political moderates
- Believe in simple solutions to complext problems
- Experience more socio-economic fear than political moderates
- Derogate more societal groups than political moderates
- Be less tolerant of different opinions than political moderates
Anti-establishment voting
- The core element of populism and extremism
- Phenomenon in which voters reject traditional political parties and candidates in favor of alternative or outsider candidates who are seen as challenging the political establishment.
- Kruger-Dunning effect
