Читать книгу Communicating Science in Times of Crisis - Группа авторов - Страница 24

“Uncertainty is a central challenge for public communication on matters pandemic” (Davis, 2019, p. 30). Reducing our uncertainty about our environments is an evolved adaptive capacity (Flack & de Waal, 2007; Kobayashi & Hsu, 2017) for managing real and perceived threats (van Prooijen & Acker, 2015). Conspiracy beliefs provide people with a sense of control over their world (Imhoff & Lamberty, 2018; van Prooijen & Acker, 2015) as well as both a sense of uniqueness (Lantian et al., 2017) relative to the masses and as a sense of belonging with other like-minded persons (van Prooijen, 2016).

A variety of disciplinary (Butter & Knight, 2016; Lazer et al., 2018; van Prooijen & Douglas, 2018) and theoretical perspectives (e.g., affect-based: Zollo et al., 2015; agenda-setting: Limperos & Silberman, 2019; cognitive biases: Brotherton & French, 2015; Douglas et al., 2016; Lantian et al., 2017; frame theory: Franks et al., 2013; gist communication: Reyna, 2020; malign actors: Bradshaw & Howard, 2018; Pomerantsev & Weiss, 2014; Xia et al., 2019; semiotics: Leone et al., 2020; Madisson, 2014), and in particular attribution theory (Clarke, 2002; Spitzberg, 2001), provide a rationale for the role of lay theorizing as a way in which humans manage their uncertainty. Thus, a basic function of conspiracy theories and fake news is likely to be uncertainty reduction in the context of threatening or anxiety-provoking uncertainty. In serving such a function, it has been proposed that “conspiracy theories have deep psychological bases that are present in all human beings” (Andrade, 2020, p. 2). van Prooijen and Douglas (2018) expanded this assumption with four basic principles about conspiracy theories: Conspiracy beliefs are (i) consequential, (ii) universal, (iii) emotional, and (iv) social. To the extent these are taken as given, then an understanding of the varieties and vagaries of dismisinformation is well-warranted.

There are several perspectives toward dismisinformation and conspiratorial thinking (Douglas et al., 2019; Sunstein & Vermeule, 2009; Weiss et al., 2020). Broadly, theories regarding fake news, conspiracy theory, and dismisinformation can focus on any of multiple levels (Giglietto et al., 2019; Sharma et al., 2019), including individual factors such as personality dispositions that promote sharing or belief in such narratives (e.g., Brotherton & French, 2014; Brotherton et al., 2013; Bruder et al., 2013; Douglas & Sutton, 2011; Douglas et al., 2019; Drinkwater et al., 2020; Enders & Smallpage, 2019; Fasce & Picó, 2019a, 2019b; Goreis & Voracek, 2019; Hart & Graether, 2018; Mercier et al., 2018; Swami et al., 2017; Talwar et al., 2019; Wood, 2017; Zimmer et al., 2019); message factors that focus on affect and negativity (e.g., Porter et al., 2010; Zollo et al., 2015); linguistic, arousal factors or message features, multimodality, repetition, topoi, and tropes that predict virality (e.g., Guadagno et al., 2013; Hameleers et al., 2020; Klein et al., 2019; Pennycook et al., 2018); diffusion dynamics (e.g., Effron & Raj, 2020; Jang et al., 2018; Mahmoud, 2020; Shin et al., 2018; Törnberg, 2018; Vosoughi et al., 2018; Xian et al., 2019; Zannettou et al., 2018); group and social norms influences (Edy & Risley-Baird, 2016a, 2016b; Quinn et al., 2017; Seymour et al., 2015); or more macro societal and cultural factors (e.g., Rampersad & Althiyabi, 2020) or events (Douglas et al., 2019). Some models attempt to integrate factors across these levels (Geschke et al., 2019; Karlova & Fisher, 2013; Leal, 2020; Spitzberg, 2019).