Conspiracy Theories

Abstract

Conspiracy theories of Jewish power and world domination as well as blood libels have been persistently present for over a millennium. This chapter briefly discusses the history and nature of these conspiracy theories and evaluates them using a developing social science literature on conspiracy theories. Empirically the authors test the relationship between belief in conspiracy theories and discrimination against Jews using data from the ADL 100 survey. Their results show an extremely strong and significant correlation between belief in conspiracy theories about Jews and both societal and governmental discrimination against Jews. Conspiracy theories provide the strongest empirical predictor of discrimination against Jews among all indicators used on this study. Interestingly, to the authors’ knowledge, there has been no previous cross-country test as to whether belief in conspiracy theories causes real-world discrimination against the objects of those conspiracy theories (in this case, Jews).