Curious about threats: Morbid curiosity and interest in conspiracy theories

Abstract

Conspiracy theories provide explanations of important events or circumstances which allege a secret plot between two or more powerful actors as the salient cause, and commonly highlight the threat presented by the plot and its conspirators. Given the importance of threat in conspiracy theories, an interest in obtaining threat-related information might predispose one to be interested in conspiracy theory. Morbid curiosity describes the tendency to seek out information about threatening or dangerous situations and is associated with an interest in threat-related entertainment. Across three studies we investigated the relationship between morbid curiosity and conspiracy theories. We found that higher trait morbid curiosity was associated with higher general conspiracist beliefs (Study 1) and the perceived threat of conspiratorial explanations of events (Study 2). Using a behavioural choice paradigm, we found that participants who chose to investigate morbidly curious stimuli were more likely to choose to learn about conspiratorial explanations for events (Study 3). Greater curiosity about the minds of dangerous people was consistently the strongest predictor of conspiratorial ideation and interest. These results suggest that morbid curiosity is an important but hitherto unstudied predictor of conspiratorial interest and belief.

Negativity bias in the spread of voter fraud conspiracy theory tweets during the 2020 US election

“…Rather, our study suggests that the content of conspiracy theory messages were, in the case we studied, more salient cues for cultural transmission. That being said, we were unable to incorporate many of the contextual and individual-level factors that have been associated with conspiracy theory beliefs in survey-based and experimental studies, such as anxiety (Radnitz & Underwood, 2017), age (Guess et al, 2019), demographic diversity among social ties (Min, 2021), and morbid curiosity (Scrivner & Stubbersfield, 2022). Such data are difficult, if not impossible, to infer from social media corpora, but could be included in future analyses based on more detailed profiles of individuals who have adopted conspiracy theory beliefs (as has been done in the extremism literature (Becker, 2019;Youngblood, 2020).…”