BOFIT Discussion Papers, Institute for Economies in Transition, Bank of Finland
No 14/2015:
Anti-Western conspiracy thinking and expectations of collusion: Evidence from Russia and China
Alexander Libman ()
and Björn Vollan ()
Abstract: Anti-Western conspiracies are frequently used by
Governments to strengthen their power. We investigate the impact of
conspiracy thinking on expectations of collusion among individuals in
Russia and China. For this purpose, we conduct a novel laboratory
experiment to measure expectations of collusion and several survey items
related to conspiracy thinking. Our survey results indicate that
anti-Western conspiracy thinking is widespread in both countries and
correlates with distrust. We find a significant effect of anti-Western
conspiracy thinking in China: Anti-Western conspiracy thinking correlates
with lower expectations of collusion. We explain this result by stronger
ingroup feeling emanating from the anti-Western sentiment. Our paper
provides a first step in analyzing the economic implications of conspiracy
thinking for society.
Keywords: conspiracy thinking; Russia; China; trust; collusion experiments; (follow links to similar papers)
JEL-Codes: C91; D83; O17; (follow links to similar papers)
51 pages, April 29, 2015
Before downloading any of the electronic versions below
you should read our statement on
copyright.
Download GhostScript
for viewing Postscript files and the
Acrobat Reader for viewing and printing pdf files.
Full text versions of the paper:
dp1415.pdf 
Download Statistics
Questions (including download problems) about the papers in this series should be directed to Päivi Määttä ()
Report other problems with accessing this service to Sune Karlsson ()
or Helena Lundin ().
Programing by
Design by Joachim Ekebom
