Communicating Science in Times of Crisis. Группа авторов
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).
Narrative Theory and Health Communication
The narrative immersion model (Shaffer & Zikmund-Fisher, 2013) extends narrative theory into health communication specifically. It proposes five broad purposes served by narratives: to persuade (e.g., alter behavioral intentions), to influence (alter behaviors), to inform (increase knowledge or decrease uncertainty), to comfort (reduce anxiety) or to engage (transport, immerse, entertain, etc.). These purposes are sought by three types of health-related narrative types: outcome narratives (i.e., the mental or physical health outcomes or effects associated with a health-related factor such as a disease or a treatment), experiential narratives (i.e., the phenomenological symptoms, progression, and senses resulting from a disease or treatment), and process narratives that explain how a person makes decisions relevant to the disease or treatment (Shaffer & Zikmund-Fisher, 2013). The model predicts different effects with different narratives, which would also suggest ways in which narratives could be manipulated to be most relevant at various stages of a disease progression or pandemic history. The model proposes that narrative realism, source credibility (ethos), and entertainment value will influence the extent of a person’s immersion in a given narrative (Shaffer et al., 2018).
Among the antecedents and consequences of such misinformation is a general distrust of institutions and information sources. In one survey of US adults regarding the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, 38% believe that government has handled the pandemic issue “badly,” 34% are not confident in the health authorities’ ability to respond, and 41% report not having enough information on how to respond (Nguyen, 2020). Of over 27,000 readers responding to a Pharmaceutical Technology poll, over half (55%) lacked confidence that the World Health Organization or national healthcare institutions could effectively manage the outbreak (Nawrat, 2020). A Pew survey (Mitchell & Oliphant, 2020) of almost 10,000 US adults in early June 2020 indicated that only two-thirds believed that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and similar health organizations got their facts about COVID-19 correct “almost all” or “most” of the time, whereas a majority distrusted President Trump and his administration for such information, believing they got such information right only “some of the time” (29%) or “hardly ever” (36%). Trust in government, public authorities, and information sources; worry, fear, and knowledge about the disease; and amount of media exposure and information-seeking behaviors tend to promote compliance with public health recommended infection prevention behaviors (Lin et al., 2014), whereas distrust in government is predictive of belief in conspiracy theories (Freeman et al., 2020a; Imhoff & Lamberty, 2018), which in turn decrease the likelihood of engaging in valid health protective behaviors (Patev et al., 2019). “In polarized, low-trust environments political actors more frequently act as sources of online disinformation. In these countries, political actors seem to fuel polarized debates by attacking political enemies” (Humprecht, 2019, p. 1984).
Diffusion Theories
Other theories may provide complementary insight into diffusion dynamics of dismisinformation. The multilevel model of meme diffusion (M3D) proposes that in information-dense ecosystems, any given message or message stream competes in an attention economy at both individual and collective levels (Magarey & Trexler, 2020; Ryan et al., 2020; Spitzberg, 2014, in press ; Stano, 2020; Zollo, 2019). In essence, humans are limited information processors facing an information ecology containing an almost infinite amount of information. In contrast to human selection, which by its nature is miserly, media contents, like nature, are profligate. Evidence suggests that people’s attention spans are decreasing as their media consumption continues to use more minutes per day of almost everyone’s quotidian activities (Spitzberg, 2019; Twenge, Martin et al., 2019; Twenge, Spitzberg et al., 2019). As Simon (1971) proposed axiomatically:
In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: A scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
(pp. 40–41)
In such contexts, bright and shiny memes that become viral tend to attract attention and divert attention away from other potentially more important or legitimate sources of information. Indeed, a distinguishing feature of fake news as a rhetorical trope is their imitation and capture “of the time-sensitive media cycle—a daily routine of mass media consumption” (Avramov et al., 2020, p. 517), suggesting there may be prototypical lifecycles