The Paranoid Style in American Politics Revisited: An Ideological Asymmetry in Conspiratorial Thinking

Abstract

It is often claimed that conspiracy theories are endorsed with the same level of intensity across the left‐right ideological spectrum. But do liberals and conservatives in the United States embrace conspiratorial thinking to an equivalent degree? There are important historical, philosophical, and scientific reasons dating back to Richard Hofstadter's book The Paranoid Style in American Politics to doubt this claim. In four large studies of U.S. adults (total N = 5049)—including national samples—we investigated the relationship between political ideology, measured in both symbolic and operational terms, and conspiratorial thinking in general. Results reveal that conservatives in the United States were not only more likely than liberals to endorse specific conspiracy theories, but they were also more likely to espouse conspiratorial worldviews in general (r = .27, 95% CI: .24, .30). Importantly, extreme conservatives were significantly more likely to engage in conspiratorial thinking than extreme liberals (Hedges' g = .77, SE = .07, p < .001). The relationship between ideology and conspiratorial thinking was mediated by a strong distrust of officialdom and paranoid ideation, both of which were higher among conservatives, consistent with Hofstadter's account of the paranoid style in American politics.

Susceptibility to misinformation about COVID-19 around the world

“…Further research is therefore needed to investigate the proliferation of COVID-19-related misinformation in specific social media echo chambers [43]. In addition, consistent with much previous research [7,10,22,23,[27][28][29][30]41,63], we find that political conservatism is associated with a slightly higher susceptibility to misinformation. However, although the direction is consistent, we did not find this association in the USA and in the UK, which is surprising given that right-leaning outlets were more likely to spread misinformation about COVID-19 in the early stages of the pandemic [64].…”

Factors Predicting Willingness to Share COVID-19 Misinformation

“…This finding fits with recent research exploring the relationship between political ideologies, conspiracist ideation, and negative-biased credulity. Generally, the more conservative an individual is the more likely they are to endorse conspiracy theories and to hold a stronger general conspiracist worldview than for individuals who are more liberal, at least for political conservatism as practiced in the United States (van der Linden et al, 2020). Additionally, research by Samore et al (2018) has found that even when political power dynamics favor conservatives, there exists a positive association between FIGURE 1 | Diagram of the two significant canonical models.…”

“…Researchers have found that belief in conspiracies correlates with the rejection of science and endorsement of pseudoscience (Lewandowsky et al, 2013a,b;Lobato et al, 2014;van der Linden, 2015;Lobato and Zimmerman, 2019) and to a general attitude toward science as lacking credibility (Hartman et al, 2017).…”

Psychological underpinnings of pandemic denial - patterns of disagreement with scientific experts in the German public during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Conspiracy beliefs generally reflect notions that events are caused by the malevolent actions of influential groups working together in secret (Brotherton et al, 2013;Douglas et al 2016). Typically, research suggests that conspiratorial thinking is related to general personality and attitudinal dispositions such as interpersonal distrust, lack of agency and control, individual and collective narcissism, need for uniqueness, paranoia, machiavelism and a feeling of powerlessness (Brotherton et al, 2013;De Zavala & Federico, 2018;Lantian et al, 2017;van der Linden et al, 2020;Moulding et al, ENDORSEMENT OF CLAIMS ABOUT COVID-19 7 2016). Endorsing conspiracies is positively linked to beliefs in the paranormal, magical thinking, and pseudoscientific beliefs (Lobato et al, 2014;Šrol et al, 2020), the rejection of science and scientific evidence (Jolley & Douglas, 2014;Kraft et al, 2014;van der Linden, 2015), and negatively related to educational achievement, conscientiousness and analytical thinking (Brotherton et al, 2013;Einstein & Glick, 2015;van Prooijen, 2017;Swami et al, 2014).…”

“…There is some evidence that Liberals (compared to Conservatives) are more inclined to believe in findings based on scientific consensus (Blank and Shaw, 2015;Hamilton et al, 2015). Indeed, in line with Hofstadter's (1964) seminal work "The paranoid style in American politics", the often-claimed notion that conspiracy theories are endorsed with the same level of intensity across the left-right ideological spectrum has been challenged across several countries in favor of ideological ENDORSEMENT OF CLAIMS ABOUT COVID-19 11 asymmetry (Imhoff & Lamberty, 2020;Miller, 2020a;Miller, 2020b;Uscinski et al 2020;van der Linden et al, 2020).…”