Expert uses Taylor Swift to blow up widely held opinion of conspiracy theorists

Americans who aggressively promote far-right conspiracy theories online are often stereotyped as older white males who live in red states, never attended college, and are avid followers of Alex Jones' Infowars or Steve Bannon's "War Room."

But according to Saverio Roscigno, a researcher at the University of California, Irvine, some of the most passionate conspiracy theorists are white-collar workers with advanced college degrees.

In a study titled "The Status Foundations of Conspiracy Beliefs," Roscigno writes, "Specifically, and unique to my results, there exists a cluster of graduate-degree-holding white men who display a penchant for conspiracy beliefs."

READ MORE:Authoritarians are the reason we still have 9/11 conspiracy theories

Roscigno discussed his findings with journalist Paul Rosenberg in an interview for Salon, noting that some of these college graduates embrace what he calls "taboo claims" — for example, claiming "that school shootings like those at Sandy Hook and Parkland are false-flag attacks perpetrated by the government" or "that the number of Jews killed by the Nazis during World War II has been exaggerated on purpose."

"These two particular claims are very disproportionately held by white graduate-degree-holding men," Roscigno told Rosenberg. "In addition, if you look a little bit deeper into some of the other survey research and even my own data, you can also see a concentration of medical-themed conspiracy beliefs among African-Americans, and among the less educated."

Roscigno draws a distinction between conspiracy theories that are "taboo" and conspiracy theories that are ridiculous but not necessarily offensive.

Roscigno told Rosenberg, "When I say 'taboo,' I basically mean that if you said something like this in public, you would face some kind of social sanction. If I told my co-workers that I thought the Earth was flat, they might laugh at me. If I told my co-workers that I thought the Holocaust was exaggerated, it would be a very different story."

READ MORE: Actor promotes Trump's movie screening by pushing QAnon's bizarre infant blood-drinking theory

Roscigno notes that pop superstar Taylor Swift is a frequent target of conspiracy theories.

The UC Irvine researcher told Rosenberg, "I bring up the Taylor Swift example to demonstrate that the realm of things under this blanket is, like, so large that trying to generalize any kind of research findings to the entire world of claims about elites doing sneaky stuff ends up being very difficult. I suspect there are claims that graduate-degree holders are more into that we haven't quite figured out yet."

READ MORE: Pentagon debunks Fox News host's Taylor Swift conspiracy theory: 'We're going to shake it off'