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Octopuses have been one of mapmakers' favorite symbols for hundreds of years—used primarily to portray threats of political movements, financial systems, warring empires and the unknown.

from Northeastern University published in the Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems finds that such octopus maps are useful for another group—conspiracists. And conspiracists don't necessarily need grasping octopus arms to get their message across.

"You don't have to go 'full octopus,'" says Michael Correll, associate research professor at Northeastern. "You can use red arrows, lines, more neutral colors, and still get people to fire these conspiratorial neurons."

Correll studies data visualization, data ethics and how humans interact with computers. But during the doldrums of the pandemic, he began collecting octopus maps, intrigued by how such symbols developed over history.

In surveying hundreds of examples—with octopuses representing everything from to fascism to —Correll finds the depictions of octopuses to be more propaganda tool than field guide.

"It's this genre of propaganda map where you try to make your opponent look like they're this big, sinister force that's everywhere and that's trying to control everything," Correll says. "It's up to you what that big sinister force is, but it's usually another country, another ideology, sometimes a religion, sometimes like a company or corporation, sometimes an individual person."

And Correll notes the use of such maps "doesn't just belong to one side."

"Pretty much every major belligerent in both world wars had a map of them as an octopus," Correll says. "There are maps of the German octopus in World War I, the French octopus in World War I, the American octopus in World War II, and so on."

Correll identifies octopus maps as generally containing six traits: centrality, "tentacularity," reach, intentionality, "grabby-ness" and threat.

Centrality and "tentacularity" refer to the physical attributes of the octopus—namely, its head and its arms (unlike squid or other cephalopods, ).

"There's this controlling influence that's got its tendrils everywhere, and there's also this implicit argument that just dealing with one threat is not enough," Correll says. "Just like the you can't cut off one arm, you have to cut off all of them."

Meanwhile, octopus maps show the creature's arms reaching into another region intentionally and acquisitively, representing a threat to the region.

But sometimes the maps are less overt. However, this doesn't mean they are necessarily less effective, Correll says.

To demonstrate, Correll and Ph.D. students Eduardo Puerta and Shani Spivak showed a group of study participants a set of maps displaying the fictional "Huskiland" and its military bases in surrounding countries. Participants then asked whether—and to what extent—they agreed or disagreed with statements about certain maps. The statements—which included: "Huskiland is expanding its military reach," and "Huskiland uses these bases to exert military or political control over its neighbors"—related to the six characteristics of octopus maps.

Correll found that with very little prompting, people identified the relationship between Huskiland and its neighbors as "tense" or "adversarial."

"The main effect we saw was that the more connections to a country, the more likely people were to view it as having these octopus-like properties that we identified," Correll says.

Correll says that the study shows that many choices in mapmaking—not just whether to draw an octopus—can determine how an audience perceives information.

"There's this real feeling among some people to think of things like conspiracy thinking and conspiratorial thought as this binary—either you have it or you don't," Correll adds. "This shows that there's a gradation."

It's an important lesson in an age of misinformation and disinformation, Correll says.

"Solving the problem of misinformation or disinformation is not as simple as just labeling all the things that are bad," Correll continues. "There are lots of really subtle ways that we convince ourselves about what's true in the world."

This story is republished courtesy of Northeastern Global News .