We live in a conspiracy theory culture now. Nobody trusts institutions; everything from online communities to political debates to public policy is all conspiratorial now. A new psychological study suggested this isn’t just a social media problem, it’s a problem of mindset
Publishing their findings in Applied Cognitive Psychology, researchers led by Adrian Furnham of the Norwegian Business School set out to understand not just what conspiracy believers think, but why they think that way.
There was a special emphasis on their fixation on “cover-ups,” the belief that powerful institutions are deliberately hiding the truth. Where every bit of evidence disproving the conspiracy is just used as further evidence of a cover-up.
The team surveyed 253 participants from countries including the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia. They analyzed 14 psychological and demographic factors, and three traits stood out, but two mattered most.
The 2 Traits That Make You More Likely to Believe Conspiracy Theories
The strongest predictor of conspiracy thinking wasn’t education, age, or intelligence. It was a low tolerance for ambiguity. People who struggle with uncertainty tend to dislike complex, messy explanations.
The randomness of life makes them anxious. Conspiracy theories offer relief by turning the chaos of it all into a clean, intentional story: someone is in control, and someone is to blame.
It’s clear-cut and to the point, conveniently leaving out the messiness, nuances, and complexities of real life. The story they believe may be nuts, but at least it’s easily summed up like a movie tagline.
The second key factor was a strong sense that the world is fundamentally unjust. For people who see society as rigged or unfair, conspiracy theories provide a moral framework that explains why bad things happen. If the system feels broken, it’s comforting to believe that a hidden group deliberately broke it.
These traits were especially pronounced among younger men, particularly those with strong religious beliefs and right-wing political views. The researchers also found an authoritarian streak among conspiracy believers, marked by rigid thinking and a general discomfort with the aforementioned concept of nuance.
A weird quirk the researchers found is that conspiracy theories aren’t interchangeable. A person may believe wholeheartedly in one conspiracy theory but find another one laughable.
Different beliefs serve different psychological needs, and one need rules them all: the need to feel certain in an uncertain world. That’s why facts alone don’t change a conspiracy theorist’s mind and why they can be easily dismissed.
Conspiratorial thinking, according to the researchers, is really about coping. Learning to cope with uncertainty, with the injustices of the world, and with the chaos and madness that people desperately seek.
If you really want conspiratorial thinking to go away, you have to fix those underlying issues, or people will just keep coming up with their own unhinged explanations.
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