2025/01/01 by Yoko Demelius, Kamila Szczepanska · 1 voice
Computer Science · Neuroscience · Social Sciences · #Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection #Misinformation and Its Impacts #Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment
paper · doi:10.1093/ssjj/jyaf018
openalex publication_date 2025/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
An ever-growing body of research clearly demonstrates the increasing role of conspiracy theories, conspiracism, and conspiratorial thinking in undermining democratic institutions and processes. Although a large proportion of the extant research draws on Western examples, the body of literature on other parts of the world (e.g. Africa and the Middle East) is expanding. In recent years, Japan has enjoyed its own boom in both academic and popular contributions to the development of, and belief in, conspiracy theories, due to the growth of the problem during the Coronavirus disease pandemic. Among these contributions is Hata Masaki’s study, an important addition providing insights into the linkages between political attitudes and the tendency to believe in conspiracy theories in the Japanese context. In his book, Hata tests how Klapper’s selective mechanism (Klapper 1960) is an appropriate theory to indicate that people are pre-conditioned with (political) views and selectively seek information that reconfirms their beliefs. According to Klapper (1960, 1957), exposure to mass communication itself does not influence public opinion; rather, mass communication is simply a trigger (Klapper 1957). Hata examines how people start to rationalize their beliefs after contact with conspiratorial narratives. The author bases his argument on Kunda’s (1990) concept of “motivated reasoning”—namely, that people are pre-equipped with their own interpretive filters and that this influences the degree to which they will accept new information or maintain consistency in their beliefs by adjusting their interpretations of any incoming new information. In particular, in this book, Hata applies Kunda’s theoretical framework, “the motivations to arrive at particular conclusions” (Kunda 1990: 480), to Japan’s public acceptance of conspiracy theories. In his study, he applied the method of survey experiment to his data to identify the causal relations between variables based on online surveys. The applied method has significant methodological strength, offering numerous possible reasons for believing in or denying the conspiratorial narratives, and Hata argues that this is critical for determining the causal relationships for conspiratorial beliefs (45).