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Part of
Conspiracy Theory Discourses
Edited by Massimiliano Demata, Virginia Zorzi and Angela Zottola
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 98] 2022
► pp. 169–192

Chapter 8
“If you can’t see the pattern here, there’s something wrong”

A cognitive account of conspiracy narratives, schemas, and the construction of the ‘expert’

ORCID logo | Sheffield Hallam University

This chapter will adopt a data-driven, cognitive stylistic approach, exploring ‘false flag’ conspiracy theories about mass shootings, specifically the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012, which claimed the lives of twenty children and six adults. ‘False flags’ are a sub-type of conspiracy theory where it is believed that, “one group commits an attack and blames it on a rival group or a fictitious group of its invention” (Kearns, Conlon, & Young, 2014, p. 46). Situated against a background of research in psychology examining the characteristics and behaviours of both conspiracy manufacturers and supporters (for example, Douglas et al. 2017; Wood et al. 2012), the chapter will use two concepts from cognitive stylistics – figure-ground, which explores the positioning of attention (Emmott and Alexander 2014; Stockwell 2009, 2020) and schema theory, which focuses on prior knowledge. Building on a previous study by the author (Mason 2019b), the chapter will explore how factually flawed false flag accounts are constructed as persuasive and credible. The research will use a triangulated design to examine stylistic patterns of discourse of both conspiracy manufacturers and supporters, through close analysis of video transcripts and viewer comments from three videos concerning Sandy Hook released on YouTube.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Conspiracy theories
    • 2.1False flags
  • 3.Analysing ‘false flags’: Methods and Data
    • 3.1Sandy Hook: Context
    • 3.2Ethical considerations
    • 3.3Data
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Narrative schemas and mental archives
      • 4.1.1Schematising source reliability
      • 4.1.2Constructing the self as ‘expert’
    • 4.2Figure-ground configuration: Confirmation Bias
  • 5.Conclusion: ‘If you can’t see the pattern here, there’s something wrong’
  • References
Published online: 1 December 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.98.08mas
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