In this chapter, we review the psychology of fear and anxiety. Additionally, we examine earlier literatures that shed light on the belief-defense motivation, the belief accuracy motivation, and the social integration motivation. In particular, we focus on personality traits and cognitive styles connected to these conscpiracy forming motives as established through prior literatures and our own experiments' data.

In this chapter, we review our empirical evidence for the premises of our framework through path analyses of cross-sectional data and longitudinal analyses of the deep state belief over the impeachment trial. Afterwards, we present our results on the sources of plausibility of conspiracy beliefs and the role of unfalsifiability.

In this chapter, we report our correlations on associations between conspiracy beliefs and conspiracy norms. This novel correlation has not been considered in prior research. Similarly, we also review the literature on the social networks on which conspiracy beliefs spread, and discuss our own data on the dissemination of tweets authored by media accounts and with varying levels of fear language.

In this chapter, we review classic works on political variables. This includes the notion of paranoid political style, as well as alienation, inequality, and the function of scapegoats in the political process. We also discuss our survey data and findings.

In this culminating chapter, we draw conclusions and present criteria for the selection of conspiracy theories worthy of debunking. Specifically, we argue for the need to balance accessibility of the beliefs in memory and the likelihood that acceptance of them will elicit problematic behavior. Lastly, we propose possible ways of debunking the various conspiracy beliefs on which the book has focused.

In this chapter, we argue that the honed-in beliefs which we focus on raise real-world concern due to their implications for behavior and consequential political considerations. Among other factors, we examine and parse out data on voting intentions, past voting behavior, and policy support.

In this chapter, we commence our analysis of media effects by considering how the media influence affective responses such as anxiety. In so doing, this chapter provides a foundation for affective influences of the media, and how this social influence might contribute to conspiracy beliefs.

In this intriductory chapter, we outline the overarching psychological and sociopolitical conspiracy belief framework. This framework is elaborated through a figure and principles that integrate important prior research contributions and advance new ones.

In this chapter, we describe the measures, samples, and methods used in our consiracy belief surveys, indicate survey items, establish measurement validity, describe our experiment on created consipracy beliefs, and specify our methods of analyzing social media.