Looking for Ties with Secret Agendas During the Pandemic: Conspiracy Mentality is Associated with Reduced Trust in Political, Medical, and Scientific Institutions – but Not in Medical Personnel

Abstract

In a preregistered research, we examined the relationships between conspiracy mentality (i.e., the individual susceptibility to endorse conspiracy theories, Bruder et al., 2013) and trust in three actors of the COVID-19 crisis: 1) Political institutions, 2) scientific and medical institutions, and 3) the medical personnel. While the two former groups have played a direct or indirect role in decisions related to public health measures, the latter has not. We expected all these relationships to be negative and mediated by the belief that the pandemic is instrumentalized by authorities to pursue secret agendas. In a study conducted with Belgian (N = 1136) and French (N = 374) convenience samples, conspiracy mentality negatively predicted trust in political institutions, and trust in scientific and medical institutions. These relations were partly mediated by belief that the pandemic is instrumentalized by authorities. In addition, distrust in political, medical and scientific institutions were highly and positively correlated, suggesting that these groups may be viewed as part of a same supraordinate category -the "Elites". By contrast, we found a small negative relationship between conspiracy mentality and trust in the medical personnel in the Belgian sample, but not in the French sample. Trust in the medical personnel was unrelated to the belief that the pandemic is instrumentalized, and only weakly related to distrust in political institutions. This suggests that individuals with a susceptibility to believe in conspiracy theories may not have a propensity to distrust all actors involved in the management of the pandemic, but only those directly or indirectly tied to decisions pertaining to public health measures.

Conspiracy mentality: How it relates to populism, relative deprivation, mistrust of expertise and voting behaviour

“…This confirmed H1, H2 and H3 of the present study. These results also confirm previous research findings by ( Erisen et al, 2021 ; Hameleers, 2021 ; Nera et al, 2022 ).…”

“…Although some previous studies examined conspiracy mentality as a predictor (e.g. Mikušková, 2021 ; Nera et al, 2022 ), we decided to approach it as a dependent variable following the prevalent line of research (e.g. Bertin et al, 2020 ; Landrum & Olshansky, 2019 ).…”

“…There is a large body of evidence showing a negative relationship between conspiracy theory beliefs and trust in science. For example, according to recent study ( Nera et al, 2022 ), conspiracy mentality negatively predicted trust in scientific institutions during the pandemic of Covid-19 (e.g. the origin of the virus, vaccination against Covid-19).…”

Assessing Healthcare Workers’ Knowledge and Their Confidence in the Diagnosis and Management of Human Monkeypox: A Cross-Sectional Study in a Middle Eastern Country

“…For example, conspiracy beliefs regarding HIV/AIDS was found to be a barrier to preventive efforts of the disease in relation to medical mistrust [ 63 ]. Recently, a study that was conducted in Belgium and France showed a harmful effect of conspiracy mentality reflected in less trust in medical and scientific institutions [ 64 ]. Furthermore, genocidal HIV beliefs was linked to less public support and participation in HIV-related programs as shown by Laura Bogart et al in South Africa [ 65 ].…”

When views about alternative medicine, nature and god come in the way of people's vaccination intentions

“…Research shows that trust in health authorities is a critical factor in vaccine acceptance (MacDonald, 2015), especially during pandemic times (Badur et al., 2020; Jennings et al., 2021; Nera et al., 2022; Turhan et al., 2022). An analysis using data from 149 countries shows that trusting healthcare workers over your close ones for medical advice is associated with increased vaccination uptake (de Figu, 2020).…”