Trendy plots - A Google Trends-based inquiry on the social determinants of conspiracy theories

Résumé En

As the diffusion of conspiracy theories has increased, many propositions have emerged to understand why people would adopt so widely that kind of beliefs. Yet, most of these explanations have come from psychology and the cognitive sciences . In this paper, we try to fill partially that gap, by exploring not only this problem from a more global point of view, trying to understand mechanisms beyond individual factors that lead to this beliefs. To that effet, following recent literature (Bail, 2018 ; Di Grazia, 2017), we monitor the queries made on the search engine Google regarding conspiracy theories, and especially their geographical repartition. Preliminary results show that not all the conspiracy theories are adopted in the same places and to the same degrees, and that conspiracy theories of the same type tend to be adopted in similar regions. Depending on their content, conspiracy theories are differently predicted by social determinants: while the interest for Extra-Terrestrial conspiracies seem to be distributed regardless of social variables, interest for theories regarding physical well-being, and even more, regarding malevolent global conspiracies seem heavily predicted by socio-demographic variables.