A study explains why people believe in conspiracy theories

June 26 () –

People may be prone to believe in conspiracy theories due to a combination of personality traits and motivations.such as relying heavily on your intuition, having a feeling of antagonism and superiority towards others, and perceiving threats in your environment, according to research published online in the journal ‘Psychological Bulletin’ by the American Psychological Association.

According to lead author Shauna Bowes, a doctoral student in clinical psychology at Emory University, the study results offer a nuanced picture of what makes conspiracy theorists tick.

“Not all conspiracists are likely to be simple-minded and mentally ill people, as popular culture often portrays. Bowes says. Instead, many turn to conspiracy theories to fill lacking motivational needs and make sense of distress and impairment.”

According to Bowes, previous research on what drives the conspiracy theorists had focused mostly on personality and motivation separately. The current study aimed to examine these factors together to arrive at a more unified explanation of why people believe in conspiracy theories.

To do this, the researchers analyzed data from 170 studies with more than 158,000 participants, mainly from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Poland. They focused on studies that measured participants’ motivations or personality traits associated with conspiratorial thinking.

They found that people were generally motivated to believe in conspiracy theories by a need to understand and feel safe in their environment, and by a need to feel that the community they identify with is superior to others.

Although many conspiracy theories seem to bring clarity or a supposed secret truth to confusing events, the need for closure or a sense of control were not the strongest motivators in endorsing the conspiracy theories. Instead, the researchers found evidence that people were more likely to believe certain conspiracy theories when motivated by social relationships.

For example, participants who perceived social threats were more likely to believe factual conspiracy theories, such as the theory that the US government planned the terrorist attacks of September 11rather than an abstract theory that governments generally plan to harm their citizens in order to retain power.

According to Bowes, “These results are largely in line with a recent theoretical framework according to which social identity motives may lead to being attracted to the content of a conspiracy theory, while people motivated by the desire to feel unique are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories general about the workings of the world.

The researchers also found that people with certain personality traits, such as a feeling of antagonism towards others and high levels of paranoia, were more likely to believe in conspiracy theories. Those who strongly believed in conspiracy theories were also more likely to be insecure, paranoid, emotionally volatile, impulsive, suspicious, withdrawn, manipulative, self-centered, and eccentric.

The Big Five personality traits—extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism—were significantly less associated with conspiratorial thinking, though the researchers said that doesn’t mean that broad personality traits are irrelevant to the tendency to believe. in conspiracy theories.

Bowes claims that future research should be carried out bearing in mind that conspiratorial thinking is complicated and that there are important and diverse variables that should be explored in the relationships between conspiratorial thinking, motivation, and personality in order to understand the general psychology underlying conspiratorial ideas.