She studies medieval literature, but her research is as relevant today as it ever was.
Elise Wang, a professor at Cal State Fullerton, is one of 28 scholars across the country selected for the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program, one of the nation’s most prestigious fellowships for social scientists and humanities scholars addressing pressing societal issues.
So what can someone who studies Chaucer tell us about America in 2024?
“It turns out, quite a lot,” Wang would say.
Her book project, which she will work on during the two-year fellowship, is titled “This is What They Want You to Think: Recognizing Dangerous Conspiracy Theories.”
Wang says that medieval texts, which often deal with miracles and holiness, outline narrative threads that reveal a lot about the kinds of not-quite-true stories people believe and why they are structurally appealing.
“A lot of the academic discussion about conspiracy theories focuses on the believer,” Wang said. “Why do people believe in conspiracy theories? What makes them believe in conspiracy theories? How do we get them to stop believing? It’s really about the psychology of the believer.”
“But I never heard anyone talk about the fact that conspiracy theories are also stories, they are narratives,” Wang added. “And literature has the means to talk about stories. So it seemed like there was a gap in our understanding of how conspiracy theories work because we were so focused on the believer.”
Wang says that today we generally divide stories clearly into two categories: fiction and nonfiction.
But medieval readers viewed stories from a wide spectrum.
“There were categories like fiction and nonfiction, as well as miracles and religious stories,” Wang said. “The genres in the Middle Ages were much more mixed, and some medieval readers were much more flexible in their attitudes toward the truth of a story.”
For example, she refers to the archaic genre of Historia, which she describes as a “spiced up” version of history.
“It was clear that the author was embellishing the story to make it better,” Wang said. “And that wasn’t considered fiction. It was just considered better writing.”
“I say that because I think we have such problems with conspiracy theories because we really don’t know what to do with the fact that many of the basic assumptions of these theories are demonstrably false,” Wang added.
For example, it is easy to prove that the earth is round. But it is difficult to convince supporters of the flat earth theory.
“You can’t just tell a conspiracy theorist that X, Y and Z aren’t true,” Wang said. “It doesn’t affect their belief. We’ve missed the point. It’s not really about logic. It’s about something else – at least I think so.”
And this “something different,” says Wang, such as genre historiography, “does not have to be 100% verifiably true.”
“People don’t like conspiracy theories because they think they’re science,” she said. “I think people like them because they help us create our identity.”
As Wang mentioned, this is where the better-studied psychology of conspiracy theories comes into play. But this is also where she hopes her research can shed light on how certain theories can, as she puts it, “take you out of this realm of nonfiction and into the realm of belief and identity.”
Because once people form a belief or identity, she says, “it can be extremely difficult to dissuade them from it.” Conversely, conspiracy theorists tend to double down on their position or go further when confronted with facts that shake their beliefs.
“The more we feel like we’ve lost control of our personal lives, our work and our world, the more we look for patterns to compensate. This preference for patterns over noise is so strong that when the facts don’t match our experience, we find a story that does,” Wang said.
Perhaps that’s one reason why misinformation about the pandemic flourished — at a time when more than a quarter of Americans felt “so stressed they could no longer function,” according to a 2022 survey commissioned by the American Psychological Association.
Perhaps this overwhelming feeling is also the reason why Wang’s research – even though it draws on literature that is 900 or 1,000 years old – still resonates today.
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