Almost all past interpretations of conspiracy stories focus on the psychology of personality, emphasizing personal beliefs, motives, and preconceptions while ignoring their social constructions in groups. This article instead takes an alternative sociological approach, one that focuses on the influences of history, culture, and political organization. The difference between focusing on a conspiracy “theory” and a conspiracy “rumor” is not purely semantic. One person can have a theory, but a rumor requires the participation of many people; it is a social phenomenon. Social groups are driven by forces beyond that of the individual personalities within it. People in the mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, acted in ways that individuals probably would not act alone.
This article offers an analysis of how conspiracy rumors work. What does it mean to ask how conspiracy rumors work? By way of a familiar metaphor, we can think of conspiracy rumors in societies like a virus in the body politic. They have distant, ancient origins; mutate into different forms over time; and are extremely difficult to eradicate completely. Some forms are more harmful than others, and some people are more susceptible to them.
Many Rumors Are Rooted in History and Culture
In the spring of 1988, in my small city of Jamestown, New York, there was a rumor in our town about Satanic cults, which caused a panic. I was anxious to learn what was happening. I realized, as a sociologist, that I was investigating a fascinating social phenomenon.
Conspiracy rumors and panics are in my area of professional training. I began an investigation that eventually led to my book Satanic Panic, which tried to explain how these social phenomena work (Victor 1993).
The central theme in the rumors was the kidnapping and murder of blond, blue-eyed virgins by Satanic cults. I knew what that meant right away, as would anyone familiar with the blood libel conspiracy story (Dundas 1991). A common theme in Satanic crime rumors since ancient times has been the kidnapping and ritual murder of children by the followers of Satan. Satan is a powerful cultural symbol for whatever, or whoever, causes the ultimate evil: the most harmful, most powerful evil. It is usually seen to be embodied in some widely disliked out-group, believed to be followers of Satan. These people become scapegoats for the underlying anxieties and fear in a society.
Folklore scholars regard Satanic crime rumors as a contemporary legend because the story themes and symbolism originated in ancient times but have constantly evolved and mutated until today. Satanic crime stories can be traced back to at least the Romans, who accused the Christians of being in a conspiracy to undermine the Roman Empire. One accusation against the Christians was that they kidnapped blond, blue-eyed virgins to sacrifice them and drink their blood during secret communion rituals. (Blond, blue-eyed Romans were a rarity and a symbol of high value.) Later, after the Christians took over the Roman Empire, the same accusations were leveled at Jews, who supposedly used the blood of virgins in their Passover rituals. The Blood Libel Myth against the Jews continued through the centuries in Europe and resulted in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews.
The most familiar example of harmful Satanic crime rumors is that of the witchcraft panics of the seventeenth century in the Massachusetts colony and in Europe. Many elderly widows were targets of scapegoating by the believers in Satan’s evildoing and killed by being burned at the stake or hanged. Conspiracy stories employing the symbol of Satan will continue to be with us. As long as there are many people who believe in Satan, they will return again and again, albeit in mutated forms.
The Social Context of Belief: Birds of a Feather Flock Together
We can understand a rumor as a collaborative storytelling process. This insight came from my PhD advisor, sociologist Tomatsu Shibutani, in his study of rumors titled Improvised News (Shubutani 1966). What Shibutani meant was that a rumor is a collective group creation. It is a constantly evolving story that many people contribute to during a time of ambiguity and uncertainty about a matter of concern. Rumors are communicated by people who think that they have juicy bits of news to share. They share these “secrets” as a way of bonding with friends, just like children share secrets as a bond. Rumors are usually spread by people who believe the stories but may also be spread by people who are simply curious or by pranksters.
How can so many people believe in a bizarre conspiracy rumor? The usual answer is that belief is due to people’s poor education or their ignorance. However, the fact is that most of the people who believe bizarre rumor stories hold culturally based preconceptions that match the basic assumptions of a particular conspiracy story. We can all be seduced into believing a specific rumor if the stories fit our preconceptions. My research found, for example, people who held a belief in Satan as the embodiment of evil were most likely to give credibility to Satanic cult crime rumors. They were likely to believe that followers of Satan commit horrendous crimes, such as murdering virgins in ritual sacrifices. In comparison, people from different cultures and religions who did not believe in the existence of Satan did not give the rumor stories any credibility.
Concretely, I was able to trace rumor communication networks by recognizing people’s cultural preconceptions. I became aware of different communication networks only when I asked the custodians at my college about the rumors. By way of a principle: different rumors travel in different communication networks. People in different communication networks live in different social worlds, isolated from each other. Today, that isolation has increased, because of the internet. My research found that the communication networks of fundamentalist Protestants were particularly (although not exclusively) likely to spread Satanic cult crime rumors: in churches that I visited, in religious publications that I read, and at conferences about Satanic cult crimes that I attended (Victor 1994).
Another key to understanding why so many people believe bizarre rumors is the social phenomenon called the “consensual validation of reality.” When people in a particular communication network hear the same stories over and over again, or read about them on their computers or smart phones, it becomes their reality. The consensual validation of reality occurs in online networks when people are enveloped in a homogeneous communication environment of family, friends, neighbors, fellow churchgoers, and Facebook “friends.”
Trying to change the thinking of individuals who believe conspiracy stories is like trying to change the personality of drug addicts, then sending them back to the streets to their drug-addicted friends and drug dealers. Networks of believers socially reinforce an individual’s belief in particular rumors.
QAnon conspiracy stories emerged in 2017 out of an obscure internet message board, which originally imitated the Pizzagate conspiracy stories about children being kidnapped in pizza shops (Network Contagion Research Institute 2020). However, the current QAnon conspiracy stories can be traced back further to the Satanic cult rumors of the 1980s and even to ancient times. QAnon followers claim that there exists a cabal of Satanic, cannibalistic pedophiles who operate an international sex trafficking ring and who control the United States government. Many followers believe that Donald Trump will save America from this evil.
QAnon conspiracy believers are an internet community in which people collaborate in creating and passing on constantly evolving rumors. On many different platforms, believers present commentary, analysis, guest interviews, and even streaming videos. Different conspiracy theories are thrown into the QAnon community like a lumpy stew. The stew includes: Trump’s “Stolen Election” lie, lies about COVID-19 vaccinations, and even the usual anti-Semitic paranoia. Much of it appeals to extreme right-wing preconceptions. Some participants are anonymous; others are not. The effect is similar to a community spreading rumors by word-of-mouth.
So, who believes QAnon Satanic crime conspiracy stories? A public opinion poll done by the Public Religion Research Institute and published in May 2021 provides some answers (PRRI Staff 2021). The survey found that while only 15 percent of Americans believe the QAnon stories, in certain religious subcultures a far larger percentage believes them. About 25 percent of white evangelical Protestants and 26 percent of Hispanic Protestants believe that Satan-worshipping pedophiles control the U.S. government, the media, and financial institutions. In contrast, the stories were believed by only 10 percent of white mainline Protestants, 11 percent of white Catholics, and 8 percent of Jews. Several other social groups also have a high percentage of people who believe the stories, such as Republicans and people who are socially conservative. In other words, QAnon rumors are spread mainly through the communication networks of fundamentalist Protestants and other very conservative people.
The attraction of money and power is another social mechanism that spreads conspiracy rumors. Many people’s perceptions can be distorted by skilled conspiracy entrepreneurs who sell lies and provoke fear to gain money and power. During the 1930s, Father Coughlin spread lies on the radio about a Jewish world conspiracy. During the 1950s, Joe McCarthy spread fear about a Communist conspiracy to take over our country. Today, conspiracy fears are being spread by influential people, such as Donald Trump and radio host Alex Jones, to gain money and power. Millions of people saw on television, in real time, a violent mob invade the United States Capitol building. Yet many thousands believe propaganda, promoted by some right-wing politicians, that they actually saw anti-Trump, antifa demonstrators.
Words Have Social Consequences
Another useful key to understanding bizarre rumor stories is the social psychological principle (called I.W. Thomas’s theorem): if people believe that something is real, it is real in its consequences. And the consequences can be very harmful. There is no way to determine the exact numbers of innocent people who were harmed by false accusations resulting from Satanic cult rumors. However, various research efforts suggest that the number is in the many thousands, harmed by included threats of violence, false accusations of crime, imprisonment of innocent people, and destruction of families.
As I continued gathering information about the consequences of Satanic cult crime conspiracy rumors, I found that more and more people were being hurt—sometimes severely—by the rumors. I became increasingly aware of false accusations of crime against innocent people caused by these rumors. For example, some scapegoated countercultural teenagers were accused of serious crimes by prejudiced police and ambitious prosecutors in conservative small towns. The most famous case took place in West Memphis, Arkansas, with the 1994 trial that became known as the case of the “West Memphis Three.” In that case, three unfortunate teenagers were falsely accused of brutally murdering three eight-year-old boys during Satanic rituals. The accusations aroused local anger and desire to quickly find someone to punish. The three accused teenagers were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. Their case received national attention in the mass media and in documentaries (such as the Paradise Lost series), which questioned the competence of the prosecution. Eventually, in 2010, they were released after spending eighteen years in prison.
There were also cases of children’s daycare workers falsely accused and arrested for so-called ritual sexual child abuse. According to newspaper reports, there may have been over 100 cases. People falsely accused of sexual abuse of children by Satanic cults numbered in the many thousands. A study of 12,264 such accusations published in 1995 by the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect didn’t find a single verifiable case (Bottoms et al. 1996).
The QAnon conspiracy rumors are even more dangerous because they pose a threat of large-scale violence. One of the consequences of the QAnon conspiracy stories was the mob assault on the Capitol building, in an act of domestic terrorism. The presence of QAnon conspiracy believers was evident in the crowds of QAnon signs, amid Nazi swastika flags and Confederate flags, proudly carried by members of the mob. As a result of the attack, one attacker was shot to death, one policeman died from a stroke, four other policemen died from suicides shortly afterward, and over 100 were severely injured. Repairs to the Capitol building are estimated to cost at least $30 million.
A Pressure Cooker Needs a Release Valve
A well-founded sociological principle suggests that rapid social change causes widespread social stress as people try to adjust to the changes. The anxiety and stress, in turn, leads to the search for scapegoats to blame for people’s daily problems. The conspiracy stories claim that “those people” are to blame for our problems.
The most familiar case is that of the German people after their defeat in World War I, when Germans experienced loss of jobs and evaporation of their income due to widespread unemployment and hyperinflation, leading to political conflict in the streets. The conspiracy stories blamed Jews, Communists, and immigrants for people’s plight.
What social conditions and stress in people’s lives can account for the return of Satanic crime rumors among QAnon believers? The underlying anxiety that can help us to better understand what is motivating the QAnon believers is fear of unfamiliar people caused by demographic changes in the American population. There is a widespread anxiety among white people in some areas of our country where the ethnicity of the population is undergoing rapid change. Rumors spread the claim that “our country is being taken over by people who are not real Americans” (meaning dark-skinned people, immigrants who don’t speak English, and people who are not Christians). This fear of replacement is an expression of white ethnocentrism, or what has been called white Christian nationalism. It is the fear expressed indirectly in concerns from some white parents about teaching about “diversity” and about systemic racism in public schools (falsely labeled “critical race theory”). It is the fear expressed in the claim, “They are taking over our country” and implied in Trump’s slogan “Make America great again.”
There is some strong evidence of fear of ethnic replacement among significant numbers of white people. Researchers at the University of Chicago’s Project on Security and Threats studied the backgrounds of 193 people charged with crimes during the violent attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 (Pape 2021). Surprisingly, these people had only one thing in common. It was not their socio-economic or educational level or rural versus urban residence. They were disproportionately white people from counties where the white population was rapidly declining and being replaced by nonwhite people. Anyone who watched the January 6, 2021, insurrection on television could see clearly, amid the QAnon signs, that the mob comprised white people almost exclusively (95 percent according to some estimates).
To Inform or to Punish? That Is the Question
There is scarce research on the successful control of large-scale rumors, perhaps because there have been very few successful efforts to control widespread conspiracy rumors. Most research on ways to control rumors involves marketing studies paid by large companies to deal with malicious rumors targeting their consumer products. For example, there have been rumors about hamburgers cooked with worms and urine in foreign beer. Most marketing studies recommend “informational” approaches that rely upon public relations techniques to cope with rumormongers. This means providing information to correct the false claims in harmful rumors and highlight the benefits of the company’s products. Unfortunately, informational approaches are of little use in trying to deal with nationwide conspiracy rumors.
An alternative might be termed a punitive approach. Such an approach may employ derogatory labeling to shame rumormongers, civil lawsuits to target specific groups, or even criminal prosecutions. An example was a slogan used by the U.S. government to discourage rumormongering during World War II: “Loose lips sink ships.” It was a brief, concise, and effective way of shaming people who might want to communicate a juicy piece of news that they heard from a friend-of-a-friend. It was successful in preventing misinformation that could cause local panics or damage national morale.
An example of a successful punitive approach was the case of Procter and Gamble Corporation, which was the target of malicious Satanic cult rumors. The rumors began circulating in the early 1980s, at the peak of Satanic cult rumors, claiming that Procter and Gamble’s logo—a bearded man-in-the moon looking over a field of thirteen stars—was a symbol promoting Satanism. Rumors also circulated that the company contributed money to support the Church of Satan. In 2007, the company won a $19.25 million civil lawsuit against four former Amway distributors, competitors whom they accused of spreading rumors linking the company to Satanism. It took decades of persistence and a lot of money to put a scare into the rumormongers.
Another example of successful lawsuits used to stop harmful conspiracy rumors comes from the defamation lawsuit brought by eight parents of children murdered in the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Several right-wing conspiracy theorists, most prominent among them radio talk show host Alex Jones, claimed that the murders were faked by paid actors to promote gun control. The lies were circulated on social media. As a result of the lies, some of the parents were harassed by death threats and were forced to move. Parents sued Jones, and in November 2021 he was found liable for damages.
An example of shaming people who communicate dangerous conspiracy rumors comes from France. In 1969, a rumor circulated in the City of Orleans that teenage girls were being kidnapped in clothing stores, drugged, and sold into white slavery. The stores had been recently opened by Jewish immigrants from North Africa. (This was another remnant of the blood libel.) Local parents became worried because the stores sold “shocking” new fashions, such as the miniskirt. The rumors were widely communicated and resulted in store closings because of boycotts and demonstrations. The rumors were investigated by a team of sociologists from the French government’s national research center, led by Edgar Morin. His book, Rumor in Orleans, quickly received national attention (Morin 1971). The rumors were contained after the news media and many antihate organizations publicized the fact that the rumors were anti-Semitic and passed around by anti-Semites and fascists. Labeling and shaming the rumormongers eventually ended the transmission of the lies.
Attempts to control dangerous conspiracy rumors must deal with them as a social phenomenon and not simply an expression of the personality quirks of individuals. This means that they are anchored in communication networks that often have an ideological or religious following. This in turn means that managing dangerous conspiracy rumors must combine ways of relieving underlying causes of social stress in people’s lives and ways of punishing the most outrageous promoters of harmful lies.
Acknowledgment
I was helped greatly writing this article by Dr. Glenn H. Utter, retired professor of political science from the University of Texas at Lamar, who offered me many suggestions for revision of the original version. I also owe a debt to my wife, Michele, for proofreading many versions of the manuscript.
References
Bottoms, B.L., P.R. Shaver, and G.S. Goodman. 1996. An analysis of ritualistic and religion-related child abuse allegations. Law and Human Behavior 20(1): 1–34.
Dundes, Alan. 1991. The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Morin, Edgar. 1971. Rumor in Orleans. New York, NY: Random House.
Network Contagion Research Institute. 2020. The QAnon Conspiracy: Destroying Families, Dividing Communities, Undermining Democracy. Rutgers University, Miller Center for Community Protection and Resilience (December 15).
Pape, Robert A. 2021. What an analysis of 377 Americans arrested or charged in the Capitol insurrection tells us. Washington Post (April 6). See original data at Pape, Robert A Chicago Project on Security and Threats.
PRRI Staff. 2021. Understanding QAnon’s connection to American politics, religion, and media consumption. Public Religion Research Institute (May 27). Online at https://www.prri.org/research/qanon-conspiracy-american-politics-report/.
Shibutani, Tomatsu. 1966. Improvised News: A Sociological Study of Rumor. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill.
Victor, Jeffrey S. 1993. Satanic Panic: The Creation of a Contemporary Legend. Chicago, IL: Open Court Publishing.
———. 1994. Fundamentalist Religion and the Moral Crusade against Satanism: The Social Construction of Deviance. Deviant Behavior 15(3): 305–334.