This paper analyzes key psychological themes in language used by prominent conspiracy theorists and science advocates on Twitter, as well as those of a random sample of their follower base. We conducted a variety of psycholinguistic analyses over a corpus of 16,290 influencer tweets and 160,949 follower tweets in order to evaluate stable intergroup differences in language use among those who subscribe or are exposed to conspiratorial content and those who are focused on scientific content. Our results indicate significant differences in the use of negative emotion (e.g., anger) between the two groups, as well as a focus, especially among conspiracy theorists, on topics such as death, religion, and power. Surprisingly, we found less pronounced differences in cognitive processes (e.g., certainty) and outgroup language. Our results add to a growing literature on the psychological characteristics underlying a “conspiracist worldview.”

本文分析了著名阴谋论者和科学倡导者在 Twitter 上使用的语言中的关键心理主题，以及他们的追随者群的随机样本。我们对包含 16,290 条影响者推文和 160,949 条追随者推文的语料库进行了各种心理语言学分析，以评估订阅或接触阴谋内容的人和专注于科学内容的人在语言使用方面的稳定组间差异。我们的研究结果表明，这两个群体在负面情绪（例如愤怒）的使用上存在显着差异，以及对死亡、宗教和权力等主题的关注，尤其是阴谋论者。令人惊讶的是，我们发现认知过程（例如，确定性）和外群语言的差异不那么明显。