Karen M. Douglas, J. Uscinski, Robbie M. Sutton
et al.
Scholarly efforts to understand conspiracy theories have grown significantly in recent years, and there is now a broad and interdisciplinary literature that we review in this article. We ask three specific questions. First, what are the factors that are associated with conspiracy theorizing? Our review of the literature shows that conspiracy beliefs result from a range of psychological, political and social factors. Next, how are conspiracy theories communicated? Here, we explain how conspiracy theories are shared among individuals and spread through traditional and social media platforms. Next, what are the risks and rewards associated with conspiracy theories? By focusing on politics and science, we argue that conspiracy theories do more harm than good. Finally, because this is a growing literature and many open questions remain, we conclude by suggesting several promising avenues for future research.
This chapter explores the entanglement of cognitive psychology with science fiction, but avoids familiar motifs from post-cyberpunk fiction. The beginnings of cognitive psychology are traced to the foundational work of figures such as George Miller and Noam Chomsky, subsequently codified into a self-conscious school by Ulrich Neisser. Jack Finney’s classic narrative, The Body Snatchers (1955), draws upon earlier proto-cognitivist discourses to contend, often quite didactically, that the human mind typically operates as a biased, limited capacity information processor. With this psychological and political thesis, the novel explores possible personal, political and aesthetic strategies that might free the human mind from its stereotypes and blind spots. The unsettling of everyday perception in The Body Snatchers is systematically generalized by the linguistic novums of Ian Watson’s The Embedding (1973), Samuel Delany’s Babel-17 (1966), and Ted Chiang’s ‘Story of Your Life’ (1998), which imagine that language (and thought) is fundamentally constructive of perceived reality. These stories ask broader, cosmological questions about the nature and accessibility of ultimate reality – with Watson’s novel ultimately proposing a mystical riposte to cognitivism’s model of the mind.
This paper analyzes the security dilemma through a comparative qualitative study of three conflicts: Russia–Ukraine, Israel–Palestine, and Thailand–Cambodia. Despite differences in geography, scale, and actors, all three cases show how mistrust, misperceptions, and defensive actions perceived as offensive drive cycles of escalation. The Russia–Ukraine conflict illustrates a systemic dilemma, shaped by identity, sovereignty, spheres of influence, and NATO expansion. The Israeli–Palestinian case highlights the limits of the framework in asymmetric conflicts, where overt hostility reduces the role of misperception. The Thailand–Cambodia dispute demonstrates how symbolism and identity can escalate a minor territorial dispute into a broader national conflict. Overall, the study confirms the security dilemma as a valuable explanatory tool in International Relations, conditioned by identity, asymmetry, and hegemonic ambitions.
Jordan Robinson, Angus R. Williams, Katie Atkinson
et al.
Real-world knowledge representation often requires capturing subjective, continuous attributes -- such as political positions -- that conflict with pairwise validation, the widely accepted gold standard for human evaluation. We address this challenge through a dual-scale validation framework applied to political stance prediction in argumentative discourse, combining pointwise and pairwise human annotation. Using 22 language models, we construct a large-scale knowledge base of political position predictions for 23,228 arguments drawn from 30 debates that appeared on the UK politicial television programme \textit{Question Time}. Pointwise evaluation shows moderate human-model agreement (Krippendorff's $α=0.578$), reflecting intrinsic subjectivity, while pairwise validation reveals substantially stronger alignment between human- and model-derived rankings ($α=0.86$ for the best model). This work contributes: (i) a practical validation methodology for subjective continuous knowledge that balances scalability with reliability; (ii) a validated structured argumentation knowledge base enabling graph-based reasoning and retrieval-augmented generation in political domains; and (iii) evidence that ordinal structure can be extracted from pointwise language models predictions from inherently subjective real-world discourse, advancing knowledge representation capabilities for domains where traditional symbolic or categorical approaches are insufficient.