Poster's note : relevant to chemtrails http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0124125
Intention Seekers: Conspiracist Ideation and Biased Attributions of Intentionality Robert Brotherton, Christopher C. French Abstract Conspiracist beliefs are widespread and potentially hazardous. A growing body of research suggests that cognitive biases may play a role in endorsement of conspiracy theories. The current research examines the novel hypothesis that individuals who are biased towards inferring intentional explanations for ambiguous actions are more likely to endorse conspiracy theories, which portray events as the exclusive product of intentional agency. Study 1 replicated a previously observed relationship between conspiracist ideation and individual differences in anthropomorphisation. Studies 2 and 3 report a relationship between conspiracism and inferences of intentionality for imagined ambiguous events. Additionally, Study 3 again found conspiracist ideation to be predicted by individual differences in anthropomorphism. Contrary to expectations, however, the relationship was not mediated by the intentionality bias. The findings are discussed in terms of a domain-general intentionality bias making conspiracy theories appear particularly plausible. Alternative explanations are suggested for the association between conspiracism and anthropomorphism. Citation: Brotherton R, French CC (2015) Intention Seekers: Conspiracist Ideation and Biased Attributions of Intentionality. PLoS ONE 10(5): e0124125. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0124125 Academic Editor: Jakob Pietschnig, Universitat Wien, AUSTRIA Received: January 15, 2015; Accepted: February 26, 2015; Published: May 13, 2015 Copyright: © 2015 Brotherton, French. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited Data Availability: The authors confirm that all data underlying the findings are fully available without restriction. All relevant data are within the Supporting Information files. Funding: This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number ES/I90249X]. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Introduction Study 1: Individual Differences in Anthropomorphisation Study 2: Conspiracist Ideation and Inferences of Intentionality Study 3: Associations between Anthropomorphisation and Intentional Inferences General Discussion Supporting Information Author Contributions References -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
