Can Documentary Films Mitigate the Negative Effects of Conspiratorial Thinking?

• In Event: Tropes and Tools of Telling Tales About Political Movement(s)

Abstract

Conspiratorial thinking in the American electorate poses two grave problems for democratic governance. First, conspiratorial thinking contributes to the spread of misinformation (Jolley and Douglas 2014). Second, conspiratorial thinking engenders distrust and disengagement with politics (Einstein and Glick 2015). People whose understanding of the political world is animated by conspiratorial thinking tend to feel powerless – they believe that the government is unresponsive and that political participation is unproductive (Fenster 2008; Uscinski 2019). In turn, they either withdraw from the political system or embrace extreme political ideologies.

How might we mitigate conspiratorial thinking and its negative effects? Journalism organizations rely on fact-checking enterprises to counteract conspiracy theories and misinformation. A large academic literature investigates the efficacy of these interventions (e.g., Lewandowsky et al. 2012; Nyhan and Reifler 2010). While corrective information improves factual accuracy, the correctives do not stick and they do not have an impact on attitudes or behaviors (Porter and Wood 2019). As such, we live in a world where facts do not influence public opinion much. Furthermore, fact-checking can lead to pernicious side-effects such as increasing the spread of the conspiracy theory and increased polarization through confirmation bias (Berinsky 2018).

We hypothesize that the most effective way to combat conspiracy theory narratives is with causal narratives that emphasize the challenge of collective action. Stories with conspiracy theory narratives and stories with collective action narratives both aspire to help people make sense of undesirable political outcomes – that is, failure to achieve their political goals. Whereas conspiracy theory narratives suggest that undesirable political outcomes are due to the fact that ordinary people are disempowered, collective action narratives foster the idea that undemocratic political outcomes result when ordinary people fail to participate and that unfair political outcomes can be combatted through effective mobilization.

There are several reasons to expect that collective action narratives will be a more effective antidote to conspiratorial thinking. First, facts and figures are useless when it comes to persuading someone to change their mind or motivating them to take action (Sharot 2017). Second, humans spend most of their leisure time seeking pleasure through stories (McKee 2010). By using stories to combat conspiracy theories, we are seeking to work with, rather than against, human cognition and its appetite for compelling narratives. Third, stories draw on our natural interest in other humans and require us to understand someone else’s experience and relate it to our own (Zunshine 2006). This helps humans identify common bonds in society and foster solidarity across groups. Fourth, by engaging with stories, humans develop social skills and moral values and learn about social problems (Nussbaum 2003). This, in turn, helps us prepare and build expectations for real-world interactions. Finally, scholars are beginning to establish empirical evidence that fictional narratives can durably shape our political attitudes (e.g., Adkins and Castle 2014; Jones and Paris 2018; Yates and Hill 2018).

For four reasons, this paper focuses on collective action narratives in documentary films. First, the documentary genre was invented as a way to build a sense of community and construct identity and, as a result, documentary films typically feature collective action narratives (Nichols 2017). Second, documentaries make the consumption of collective action narratives pleasurable by introducing fictional elements that make the factual record engaging (Bloom 2010). Third, documentaries can bring collective action narratives to wide audiences. In the past thirty years, documentaries have become increasingly accessible, entertaining, and popular (Seymour 2018). Finally, audiences view contemporary documentaries as a credible source of knowledge and an authentic representation of reality (Nichols 2017).

In an experiment conducted among one thousand college students, we find that exposure to a documentary film with a collective action narrative, such as Netflix’s Knock Down the House (2019) or The Constitution Project’s The U.S. Bill of Rights (2010), boosts political efficacy and depresses conspiratorial thinking. While many scholars highlight facts and reason as a key solution to ignorance and misinformation (e.g., Sunstein and Vermeule 2009), our theoretical and empirical evidence suggests that using narratives to appeal to emotions is a far more effective strategy. Furthermore, our results suggest that political science education rooted in narratives boosts civic engagement.

Authors

• Darin DeWitt, California State University, Long Beach

• Matthew Atkinson