Implications for understanding conspiracist ideation.
Our principal thesis is that some of the responses to LOG12 voiced in the blogosphere satisfy attributes of conspiracist ideation by the criteria defined at the outset. Two attributes deserve to be highlighted: First, most of the hypotheses can be united under the immutable belief that "there must be something wrong" (MbW in Table 3) and that the authors of LOG12 engaged in intentional malfeasance (NI, NS). Those underlying beliefs infused conspiracist elements even into those hypotheses that would be expected to arise during routine scholarly critique. For example, the \scamming" hypothesis evolved continuously without being guided by clear a priori assumptions about what would constitute a "scammed" response prole, thereby ultimately rendering this hypothesis self-sealing and falsifiable (criterion, SS) It is this psychological attribute that points towards a conspiracist component rather than conventional scholarly critique...
Our research also points to at least two issues that merit further investigation. The first issue arises from the well-established fact that the rejection of climate science is strongly associated with right-wing political leanings and the embrace of a "fundamentalist" laissez-faire vision of the free market (e.g., Dunlap & McCright, 2008; Feygina, Jost, & Goldsmith, 2010; Hamilton, 2011; Heath & Giord, 2006; Kahan, 2010; Kahan, Jenkins-Smith, & Braman, 2011; McCright & Dunlap, 2011a, 2011b). There is a parallel literature that has linked conspiracist ideation, at least in some cases, with right-wing political leanings: For example, Swami (2012) found endorsement of an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory in Malaysia to be associated with right-wing authoritarianism. Similar associations with authoritarianism have been reported by Abalakina-Paap, Stephan, Craig, and Gregory (1999) and Swami et al. (2012) in samples of Western participants. One might therefore be tempted to consider conspiracist ideation another manifestation of the "paranoid style" in American politics mainly focused on the political Right that was famously highlighted by Hofstadter (1966)...
Second, we uncovered a potentially novel aspect of conspiracist reasoning when some of the later hypotheses were found to involve a residual impact of earlier, discarded hypotheses. For example, whereas critics initially argued that the results of LOG12 were invalid because "skeptic" bloggers were not contacted (hypothesis 2 in Table 3), upon release of evidence to the contrary, the same conclusion of invalidity was reached by other means; either because of a preliminary report of the data during a colloquium (hypothesis 3); or because of the presumedly faulty timing of the correspondence (hypothesis 4); or because \skeptic" bloggers were emailed different versions of the survey (hypothesis 5). All of those hypotheses rely on counterfactual thinking because no \skeptic" blogger posted links to the survey, and therefore neither the dates of correspondence nor the version of the survey (nor any other event involving those bloggers) could have affected the data as reported in LOG12...
. It's their loss, in my opinion.
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