“Everyday Life As an Intelligence Test: Effects of Intelligence and Intelligence Context § Conspiracy Rumors in Everyday Life”, 1997 (; similar):
This major section extends the IQ model into the domain of public opinion concerning what is to be accepted as factual. The domain of factual opinion often lacks the constraints imposed on performance outcomes by real consequences, and it adds the element of irreducible uncertainty that characterizes events not personally witnessed by all. Such considerations can work for or against success of the model. Uncertainty calls forth judgment, but loosening of practical constraints can add unpredictability to outcomes. Surveys concerning belief in conspiracy rumors and key beliefs about the O. J. Simpson trial provide the main data.
Conspiracy Rumors in Everyday Life
Although conspiracy themes among Whites have long been studied (1966; 1996; 1965), the many rumors centered around conspiracies, some quite elaborate, that have been afloat in the African-American community at one time or another have just recently drawn scholarly attention (1993). Often, those rumors concern consumer products manufactured by White corporations and their imagined sponsorship by the Ku Klux Klan (eg. Kool cigarettes because of the K) or supposed adulteration of fast foods aimed at sterilizing Black males. Others target the government. Black celebrities, authority figures, academics, and media outlets sometimes lend credence to the rumors, and peers sometimes punish better informed individuals for defying the messages.
…Black organ donations are few because of distrust of the medical system and belief in myths (“Why More”, 1995), fostered, for example, by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan…“Public-health workers say that the discussion of AIDS as a plot against blacks has eroded the credibility of AIDS prevention campaigns and has made some blacks suspicious of AIDS tests and treatments”…The director of a Black studies program stated that they diverted attention “from the resolution of pressing social problems” (1990, p. A19). Andrew Cooper, publisher of a Black newspaper in Brooklyn, warned that the rumors were dysfunctional for all, observing, “It is a danger to America to have a large group of its citizens believe that its government is in a conspiracy to eliminate them”…Rumor experts offer no account for why, if a rumor is believed by a certain percentage of Blacks, it will also be believed by a certain, but smaller, percentage of Whites…What did account for the more than 40-point race split in public opinion over O. J. Simpson’s guilt?…the Brawley case dominated the news…Finally, a 7-month grand jury investigation concluded that the entire affair was a hoax, originally contrived by Brawley and her mother to cover up the girl’s 4-day absence from home.