“We All Have a Conspiracy Theory in Us”

Conspiracy theories are often assumed to be the obsessions of social media trolls or reclusive kooks. But one widely cited study found that nearly all Americans believe in at least one. “We all have a conspiracy theory in us,” says Hayagreeva “Huggy” Rao, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Some ungrounded beliefs — like being convinced that vending machines are built to deliberately eat your coins — are relatively harmless. Others, such as assuming your boss secretly plans to eliminate your team, can undermine corporate culture. And politicized conspiracy theories — such as the idea that COVID vaccines implant chips that control people or that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS — have arguably led to hundreds of thousands of deaths. “They can have horrible, tragic consequences,” Rao says.

Never before have outrageously false notions spread with such ease. “Social media platforms allow more effective and widespread dissemination of conspiracy theories than the world has ever seen,” Rao writes in his new book, Ctrl+Alt+Doubt: Decoding the Language of Online Conspiracy Talk.

To understand the evolution of digital conspiracy theories, Rao and Henrich Greve, PhD ’94, a professor of entrepreneurship at INSEAD, analyzed hundreds of thousands of Twitter posts from the rise of the COVID pandemic in 2020. Using natural language processing, they traced semantic similarities between conspiratorial tweets and followed users as they moved from one theory to the next.

Their findings dispel several common misconceptions about how people get swept up in conspiratorial thinking. “Conspiracy theorists are not paranoid, crazy individuals; people embrace conspiracies to resolve uncertainty,” Rao says. Social media can draw people deeper down the “rabbit hole” through shared language and a sense of community.

Insights spoke with Rao about the proliferation of misguided beliefs and how policymakers and corporate leaders can respond.

What exactly is a conspiracy theory?

Huggy Rao: They often begin as hazy rumors, which then harden into a narrative. Conspiracy theories have three characteristics: First, there is a hidden cabal. Second, they’re out to do harm — it could be perpetrating a hoax or trying to kill you. Finally, a lack of evidence is proof of the conspiracy. It’s a sealed system of belief, and it’s very hard to dislodge once it’s taken root.

Doubting official statistics, questioning the effectiveness of a vaccine, or suspecting corporate downsizing is not necessarily conspiratorial. Skepticism becomes conspiratorial when people infer hidden, malevolent coordination and begin treating contrary evidence as further proof of deception.

What made you want to better understand conspiracy theories?

Rao: Henrich and I were puzzled by all the conspiracy theories floating around during the pandemic: The federal government created COVID, hospital beds were empty, and Bill Gates was using the vaccine to nefarious ends, among many others. Most existing research looked at the psychological needs underlying a conspiracist mindset, largely based on surveys, or at the network effects of echo chambers. It completely missed narrative. In the end, conspiracy theories are built with words.

What did you learn about why people gravitate toward conspiracy theories?

Rao: The picture that emerged is that conspiracy theorists are not paranoid, crazy individuals; people embrace conspiracies to resolve uncertainty. During COVID, as the case rate, mortality, and governmental restrictions increased, individuals felt very threatened and uncertain. When that happens, they construct narratives to make sense of the world.

Conspiracy theories rest on a foundation of doubt. With ordinary doubt, you don’t have a problem revising your core hypothesis based on evidence. Here, we are talking about runaway doubt, which feeds on itself. The net result: There is no truth. Everything is a big lie. The more conspiracy theories you have, the more you can protect your core belief — distrust of authority — even if one of them is disproven.

What Henrich and I are trying to explain is how ordinary doubt becomes runaway doubt. People do not simply acquire false beliefs one at a time. They acquire a repertoire of interconnected narratives that reinforce one another. The puzzle is how doubt, initially directed at a particular claim or institution, becomes a generalized conviction that nothing official can be trusted.

How do people get drawn in, and how do theories spread?

Rao: Few people are going to start at zero and say, “COVID is a bioweapon designed by the Chinese to kill us.” Instead, we realized that people start with gateway conspiracies — doubts that are entirely plausible. For example, someone might believe that officials miscounted the number of deaths. Once you get onto that, you’re exposed to other conspiracy theories and move onto more pernicious narratives, like “5G is responsible for COVID.”

Alice fell into the rabbit hole all by herself. These days, in digital publics, falling into a rabbit hole is a process of joining a community and learning its language. Conspiracy theories are shared and refined through conversation. You’re joining a subculture where you learn a map of semantic associations powered by social connections. That is an important departure from purely psychological explanations.

We found that people tend to adopt semantically similar conspiracy theories and traverse this semantic ladder very quickly. Eventually, they may wind up endorsing completely inconsistent conspiracy theories.

Ordinarily, contradictory explanations should weaken confidence. Yet someone may entertain both the claim that COVID was a hoax and the claim that it was a deliberately engineered bioweapon. Why? Because the underlying conviction is not necessarily about COVID. It is about the untrustworthiness of authorities. Individual theories can be discarded while the larger narrative remains intact.

What is the role of bots and superspreaders in this?

Rao: We realized that both use different language than other users. Bots are in offense mode: They try to sow panic and anxiety. Humans tend to be comparatively milder. They’re in defense mode, trying to tamp down a threat and construct a narrative to make sense of what is happening. Humans and bots feed off one another.

Superspreaders are people who bridge different social groups and different conspiracy theories. They’re more visible than others and have an outsized reach. We thought they’d use very emotional language, but they were less emotional compared to other Twitter users. This is counterintuitive. They outline a possibility, a provocation, and then other people project emotion onto that. They were stoking moral outrage, but they weren’t getting worked up themselves.

How do these findings relate to the business world?

Rao: Many don’t realize that conspiracy theories aren’t limited to the digital world — they are inside companies and organizations where we work. When official explanations leave important questions unanswered, employees construct alternative explanations.

For example, I was teaching executives from a consumer goods multinational, and they had a productivity initiative. I asked, “What conspiracy theories are floating around in your company?” I heard, “Downsizing… They’re going to can remote workers… They’re going to make us work more and not pay us more.”

I asked, “Do you think your leaders are aware of these conspiracy theories?” Forty percent said yes. I asked the rest, “What do you think?” Someone said, “This is another conspiracy theory — that our leaders know the conspiracy theory and are going ahead with it.”

It’s normal to be afraid and anxious, but when employees make sense of this as, “They’re out to get us,” that becomes a conspiracy theory. These shadow narratives undermine what leaders are trying to do and threaten the narrative legitimacy of leaders — it’s a crisis of faith in a company. And the tragedy is that leaders are completely unaware that employees are harboring and trafficking in these.

How can we stop false beliefs from spreading?

Rao: In hierarchical organizations, leaders need to be more cognizant of their blind spots. If leaders fail to acknowledge uncertainty, trade-offs, and legitimate costs, they inadvertently create the conditions in which shadow narratives flourish. Leaders must learn to detect these narratives early and respond credibly. More broadcasting of the official story is not necessarily the answer.

In both organizations and digital spaces, we need to expose people to opposing evidence. Ideally, you do this before people get on the gateway to conspiracies by offering “prebuttals.” That means articulating not only the benefits of something, but also the costs — for example, the risks of vaccines or downsides of new corporate initiatives. If you don’t say anything about costs, people are going to fill that with their own stories.

Preventing conspiracy theories requires more than just supplying facts. It requires intervening before uncertainty hardens into conviction, acknowledging what is genuinely unknown, and ensuring that people have trustworthy relationships through which competing interpretations can be examined.