Conspiracy Theories: A Cultural Evolution Theory approach

Conspiracy theories have been part of human culture for hundreds of years, if not millennia, and have been the subject of research in academic fields such as social psychology, political science, and cultural studies. At present, there has been little research examining conspiracy theories from a cultural evolution perspective. This chapter discusses the value of cultural evolution approaches to understanding the diffusion of conspiracy theories. Focusing on the role of biases in cultural transmission, it argues that a key advantage of applying a cultural evolution approach to this phenomenon is that it provides a strong theoretical and methodological framework to bridge the individual-, inter-individual-, and population-level factors that explain the cultural success of conspiracy theories, with potential for producing insights into how to limit their negative influence.