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Theories are constituted of metaphors (Hawes, 1975) and narratives (DiMaggio, 1995; Pentland, 1999; Shepherd & Suddaby, 2017), so one tributary of scholarly inquiry and theory needs to understand what makes narratives cognitively and memetically “sticky” (Stano, 2020). Stories and narratives represent one of the fundamental ways in which people make sense of and communicate about policies (Peterson, 2018). The nature of narratives (Corrigan & Denton, 1996), and therefore, conspiracy theories (Gebauer et al., 2016), is to provide descriptive and explanatory arcs of actors and events, which naturally fit into human conceptions of causation (Corrigan & Denton, 1996). “Because of their explanatory power, stories can be linked into cycles to form conspiracy theories, often bringing together normally disparate domains of human interaction into a single, explanatory realm” (Shahsavari et al., 2020, p. 3). For example, a study of anti-vax Instagram posts found that they had greater engagement, more misinformation, and were more likely to involve personal narratives, compared to provax posts (Kearney et al., 2019).

Narratives have the ability to focus and simplify complex policy-relevant information in a way that stimulates and maintains attention (Peterson, 2018). False narratives, therefore, become an attractive strategic tactic for malign or exploitative actors. Conspiracy theories are pervasive in much the same way that many stories and myths are (Leone et al., 2020): “They invoke the same kind of ‘whodunnit’ questions that are found in crime fiction and spy novels and incite us to imagine an alternative reality, which is more spectacular, more intriguing, but also more horrifying than the one that we are familiar with” (Bjerg & Presskorn-Thygesen, 2017, p. 138).

Fisher’s (1980, 1985a, 1985b) narrative paradigm, which begins with the ontological shift of viewing humans as homo narrans, suggests that rhetorical competence consists of the rationality involved in the “mastery of the logic of good reasons,” which insures “the minimal, perhaps the optimal, kind of knowledge that must inform the invention, composition, presentation, and criticism of rhetorical messages and interactions” (Fisher, 1980, p. 122). There are two primary criteria of narrative rationality: narrative fidelity (i.e., “the soundness of its reasoning and the value of its values,” Fisher, 1985a, pp. 349–350) and narrative probability (i.e., the extent to which “a story coheres or ‘hangs together,’ whether or not the story is free of contradictions,” p. 349). Each of these criteria can be further differentiated (Baesler, 1995). Conspiracy theory and much of the fake news that provide fuel for such theory are rhetorically shaped to appeal to narrative fidelity and probability in the two genres that support such narrative structures: “storytelling and argumentation” (Bangerter et al., 2020, p. 207).

Given a reservoir of cultural stories and mythic narrative structures from which to draw, “conspiracy theorists collaboratively negotiate a single explanatory narrative framework, often composed of a pastiche of smaller narratives, aligning otherwise unaligned domains of human interaction as they develop a totalizing narrative” (Shahsavari et al., 2020, p. 16). These narrativizing predispositions can be illustrated even in early representations of disease outbreaks. For example, in considering the records of the fourteenth-century Black Death pandemic, Carmichael (1998) concluded that “most plague accounts … impose narrative order on a past plague, assigning its beginning, middle, and end, and selecting which facts and memories are needed to capture the essence or meaning of the plague” (p. 134).

Such narrative configurations or templates are stoked by routine and evolved cognitive biases that enhance narrative fidelity. For example, there is some experimental evidence for a Sarrazin effect, in which the greater the availability or accessibility of extreme or ordinarily implausible explanatory options, the more people tend to move toward conspiratorial accounts (Raab et al., 2013). Another conjecture is that conspiratorial thinking is reinforced by a tendency to seek “us-versus-them” identities (Leone et al., 2020). A third cognitive bias may be the tendency to attribute or seek intention (Brotherton & French, 2015) or agency (Douglas et al., 2016) underlying otherwise potentially accidental or coincidental events, which may also take the form of a tendency of people to presume greater explanatory depth, precision, and coherence than actually exists (Rozenblit & Keil, 2002). There is also evidence for the proportionality bias, which predicts that extreme events cannot be the product of nonextreme causes, and thus, vast disruptive and unusual events stimulate human tendencies to attribute agency, to concoct narratives of actors pulling levers behind the curtain, simply, for example, because “in medical conspiracy theories, unfortunate things (such as, say, the outbreak of some virus) cannot just happen without a purpose” (Andrade, 2020, p. 5). Furthermore, “the more horrendous the consequences of an event, the more brutal and inhuman are those who caused it” (Madisson, 2014, p. 297). In short, narratives with anthropomorphized actors can provide coherence to the unimaginable incomprehensibility of random chance and evolutionary biology.

An iconic-continuous originator of danger is depicted, to a greater or lesser extent, in all conspiracy theories, … where it is expressed in approximately this manner: There must be dark forces behind the catastrophe or that there is a terrible conspiracy behind the catastrophe. The enemy inheres as an essential figure within the very concept of conspiracy.

(Madisson, 2014, pp. 282–283)

Given that conspiracy theories require an assumption that things are secret or being hidden, it follows that belief in invisible things (e.g., angels, devil, ghosts) is associated with conspiratorial thinking (Goertzel, 1994; Oliver & Wood, 2014). An analysis of mediated beliefs in paranormal phenomena (i.e., ghost stories) suggest the criteria of versatility (“flexibility to represent a cross-section of moods, locations, or themes that span diverse literary genres”), adaptability (“the ability to evolve over time with changes in society”), participatory nature (the facility proffered by the narrative to invite individual and social activity, such as through tours and amateur clubs), universality (of interest to diverse populations, cultures, world views, and belief systems), and scalability (“engage people individually and collectively, via meme-like ‘contagious’ processes” (Hill et al., 2019, p. 6)). Most conspiracy theories presuppose a non-transparency, such as a cover-up or manipulation of information, which protects the publicity or the official narrative and account of the event, which, of course, implies a group of conspirators who sustain such non-transparency (Raab et al., 2013).

The invisibility underlying conspiracies is also one of the features that makes them resistant to opposing accounts, much less falsification—counterarguments and counterevidence not only do not take into account what is hidden but are misleading products of the cabal that seeks to remain hidden. Of course, Big Pharma has a profit motive to sustain science that supports vaccines, and, of course, China wants everyone to believe the science that 5G will bring only convenience and efficiency to our communications, rather than activating population control through its bioengineered virus. People who only pay attention to “the evidence” are simply not woke to what is happening in secret.

Thus, part of the challenge of identifying and managing conspiracy theories is their paradoxical nature in regard to signification, representation, and rhetorical usage (Madisson, 2014). For example, conspiracy theories represent “a paradoxical duality” in that they are constructed to appear testable like any other set of theoretical hypotheses, yet “on the other hand, the actual usages of the concept of a ‘conspiracy theory’ often carry the implication that even its possible truth is excluded” (Bjerg & Presskorn-Thygesen, 2017, p. 141)—that is, they claim exemption from direct test or counterfactual falsification by virtue of the conspiratorial influences at work. This is consistent with a common theme that such theories depend on “self-reported access to hidden, secret, or otherwise inaccessible information” (Shahsavari et al., 2020, p. 16). Thus, they appear to claim the traditional narrative as false or deceptive (i.e., “fake”), while simultaneously referring to evidence in support of their claims and excluding the prospect of falsifying their own truth-status. Furthermore, the need to avoid narrative coherence or dissonance, or “the structural breakdown of a given narrative because of emotional, moral, thematic, or conceptual contradictions within the story itself” is defensively employed and deployed as a barrier to incorporating corrective information (Malena-Chan, 2019, p. 160). Finally, some fake news that is the product of conspiracy theory is generated such that the news shared may itself be valid or factual, and what is fake is the source and intent of the news. For example, some of the Russian Internet Research Agency’s information warfare objectives “were to exacerbate division and sow discord among the American public” yet were perpetrated under the guise of a false cultivated persona of an ordinary citizen Jenna Abrams (Xia et al., 2019, p. 1647).