No abstract

For a long time, conspiracy theories have received relatively little scholarly attention in psychology or political science but seemed like eccentric quirks of only a few. Since increased visibility of conspiracy beliefs around 9/11, election fraud, and most recently the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 (e.g., the concerted spread of #filmyourhospital, Gruzd & Mai, 2020), this has drastically changed. At first glance, these different conspiracy beliefs appear to be diverse regarding the range of topics covered (e.g., terrorism, democratic processes, health crises), the political orientations endorsing them (e.g., blaming the Republican Bush administration for the 9/11 inside job vs. blaming Democrats to 'steal' the US-election in 2020) as well as their likelihood from scientific perspectives. Some narratives are proven to be very unlikely (Grimes, 2016) while others are more plausible and connected to rational skepticism (Stojanov & Halberstadt, 2019).A closer look, however, reveals shared principles: Conspiracy theories (defined as ' attempts to explain the ultimate causes of significant social and political events and circumstances with claims of secret plots by two or more powerful actors ', Douglas et al., 2019, p. 4) express per definition inter alia mistrust in authorities and powerful groups and the motivation to find explanations (for a critical discussion of the assumption that conspiracy theories only target powerful actors, see Nera et al., 2021). Consequently, research elaborated the empirical commonality that people who believe in one conspiracy also tend to believe in others (Goertzel, 1994) raising the question if this finding can be attributed to a homogenous construct such as a generalized political attitude (Imhoff & Bruder, 2014) or a monological belief system (Goertzel, 1994). But the existence of a general mindset remains a controversial issue including calls for a more differentiated perspective (Hagen, 2020;Pierre, 2020;Sutton & Douglas, 2020b). The aim of the present studies is to provide further empirical evidence addressing the question of consistency of conspiracism by examining latent response profiles of participants. The Conspiracy MindsetThe assumption of a general mindset relies basically on the robust empirical evidence that conspiracy items are substantially intercorrelated (Goertzel, 1994;Swami et al., 2010;Swami et al., 2011), even when the narratives are contradictory (Miller, 2020;Wood et al., 2012). It suggests that the degree of agreement on various items has common grounds explaining the connections; e.g., as a

Religious and conspiracy beliefs share the feature of assuming powerful forces that determine the fate of the world. Correspondingly, they have been theorized to address similar psychological needs and to be based on similar cognitions, but there exist little authoritative answers about their relationship. We delineate two theory‐driven possibilities. If conspiracy theories and religions serve as surrogates for each other by fulfilling similar needs, the two beliefs should be negatively correlated. If conspiracy and religious beliefs stem from the same values and cognitions, this would speak for a positive correlation that might be diminished—for example—by controlling for shared political ideologies. We approached the question with a meta‐analysis (N = 10,242), partial correlations from large Christian‐dominated datasets from Germany, Poland, and the United States (N = 12,612), and a preregistered U.S. study (N = 500). The results indicate that the correlations between religiosity and conspiracy theory endorsement were positive, and political orientation shared large parts of this covariance. Correlations of religiosity with the more need‐related conspiracy mentality differed between countries. We conclude that similarities in the explanatory style and ideologies seem to be central for the relation between intrinsic religiosity and endorsing conspiracy theories, but psychological needs only play a minor role.

No abstract

Conspiracy theories express mistrust in common explanations and epistemic authorities. Independent of concrete content, the extent of endorsing conspiracy theories has also shown associations with interpersonal mistrust. Arguing from an evolutionary and error‐management perspective, this increased interpersonal mistrust could either represent an enhanced sensitivity to untrustworthiness cues, or a limited ability to recognize trustworthiness, or non‐specific mistrust without differentiations between (un)trustworthiness cues. In two experimental studies (N = 563), we manipulated facial trustworthiness and tested the differentiation of trustworthiness evaluations as a function of conspiracy mentality. We found that conspiracy mentality was associated with a generalized tendency to perceive others as untrustworthy, independent of facial trustworthiness, speaking to non‐specific manifestations of mistrust. However, the association between conspiracy mentality and trust became non‐significant once age was accounted for in Study 1. We discuss how conspiracy mentality may be associated with an increased propensity to view the world as having malevolent intentions.