Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by rimiform 1973 days ago
> Most of the higher-quality longitudinal evidence I've seen does not show that there is an increase in believing in conspiracy theories or misinformation (or, as we used to call it, people simply being incorrect).

Do you have a source for that? Not trying to dispute your claim, just curious.

1 comments

When I googled I found these claims:

"There are no major comprehensive, longitudinal studies on Americans’ attitudes toward conspiracy theories, mostly because it was not rigorously measured until about 10 to 20 years ago."

"...reviewed over 120 years of letters to the editor, from 1890 to 2010, for both The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. In over 100,000 letters, this review showed absolutely no change in the amount of conspiracy theory belief over time. In fact, the percent of letters about conspiracy theories actually declined from the late 1800s to the 1960s and has remained steady since then."

They cite: American Conspiracy Theories - Joseph Uscinski & Joseph Parent.

Quotes from here:

https://theconversation.com/are-conspiracy-theories-on-the-r...