A deeper dive with a twist
At this point I began to wonder how long conspiracy theories have been developing their negative connotations. I started looking into the history of conspiracy theories. Interestingly enough there is a conspiracy theory about the origin of the term “conspiracy theory.” An article from The Conversation discussed how a group of people believe that the CIA invented the term “conspiracy theory.” Lining up with what I discovered about the complexity of conspiracy theories, this theory comes in a variety of forms. The most dramatic form claims that the CIA used the words “conspiracy” and “theory” together for the first time. However, searching the term on google reveals usage of the term dates back to the 1870’s with more frequent usage occurring in the 1950’s. The second form acknowledges that the term existed before but claims that the CIA created the term’s negative connotations so that it could be used as a tool for political propaganda.
Both forms of this conspiracy get their evidence from a document called “Concerning Criticism of the Warren Report.” As a whole “The Warren Report” concerns the assassination of of JFK specifically whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone as the shooter (conspiracy theories about JFK’s assassination are still prominent today). It concludes that he did act alone. However, “Concerning criticism of the Warren Report” focuses on the large number of people who questioned the official investigation of the murder, the information in it aims to provide CIA agents with arguments to defend the official version of the story. In reality the word “conspiracy theory” is never used and “conspiracy theories” is only used once in the document.
This encouraged me because I realized that other people had identified that there were potentially negative side effects with conspiracy theory labeling. It also showed that, while the term “conspiracy theory” has existed for a while, the negative connotation may have arose within the last 50-100 years.
Just as I was beginning to somewhat understand the results of this exploration, a twist emerged.
It came in the form of recent research published in 2016. The report, which is titled “Some dare call it conspiracy: labeling something as conspiracy does not reduce belief in it,” presents an experiment done by researchers that suggest that there is not a negative connotation around the word “conspiracy theory.” In their experiment they surveyed 2 groups of participants on if they were likely to believe certain claims. The claims were a mixture of true and false. One group saw the claims presented as “conspiracy theories” and the other group saw them presented as “ideas.” The study ended up concluding there was no statistical difference in belief between those who saw the claims as “conspiracy” and those who saw the claims as “ideas.” They suggested that this could be because conspiracy theories have a romanticism aspect. In that humanity is at piece and is only disrupted by the evil actions of others. This is common to display in films, video games, and television shows.
This research contradicts the information already presented thus far, which makes it a tempting piece of the exploration to leave out. But it’s important to consider the complexity of the conspiracy theory discussion. This same paper mentioned a separate paper published by Wood and Douglas in 2013 titled “What about building 7?” that suggested that people argue against the conspiracy theory label when it is applied to something they believe in.
Even with the results of the study there is still a perceived negative aspect to idea’s being presented as conspiracy theories. After all, people arguing that their idea’s aren’t conspiracy theories implies that being a “conspiracy theory” is bad. And the existence of the “Conspiracy Theory” conspiracy theory shows that I’m not alone in perceiving a negative connotation. Even if people aren't equally as likely to believe a conspiracy theory as they are an idea there is still a portion of the population that considers labeling ideas as conspiracy theories to be a negative label.
At this point, it was clear that an idea being labeled as a conspiracy theory is not a complement to the theories reasoning and that I wasn’t alone in my initial misconceptions.