About the seminar
Date: 16 June 2020, 11:00 to 12:00
Title: The Psychology of Conspiracy Mentality
Speaker: Prof Roland Imhoff (University of Mainz)
In the current pandemic, there has been an upsurge in conspiracy suspicions about COVID-19 at almost a global scale. Some people insinuated that COVID-19 is a hoax, invented or exaggerated for nefarious purposes like population control or mandatory vaccinations or that SARS-Cov-2 was purposefully created in a laboratory for similar reasons. As data suggest, to a large extent these were the same people. In my talk, I want to shed light on the general propensity to accept conspiracy-based explanations even if these contradict each other and give an overview of the antecedents and consequences of such a conspiracy mentality. Specifically, I will try to highlight what kind of needs conspiracy explanations might satisfy, what kind of implications such a worldview has for reactions to power and political action in general and close in discussing whether one should and how one could intervene in conspiracy-laden discourses.
The seminar will be hosted as a Webinar. For more information, email stakeholderrelations@bankofengland.co.uk.
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