It’s Not Just You—Most of Us Believe in at Least One Conspiracy Theory, Scientists Say
- A new meta analysis of 170 studies identifies qualities of people who believe conspiracy theories.
- This paper is not a new study; it’s a statistical analysis of existing work and findings.
- Researchers find that most people in the world believe at least one conspiracy theory.
Most people believe at least one conspiracy theory, according to a new paper in the journal Psychological Bulletin that combines years of studies and papers on conspiracy theory thinking into one big meta analysis. The analysis is not a comment or political statement on the idea of conspiracy theories, but instead a straightforward look at the people who believe them.
Shauna Bowes, a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at Emory University, led the team, which includes two other researchers. In their paper, they note that this field has exploded in recent years: not conspiracy theories necessarily, but the study of them. Their goal in the new paper was to survey existing literature—the researcher in-term for a compilation of papers that have already been published—to come up with an analysis of what this collective body of work is saying. In other words, it’s a snapshot of a given field of study at a particular time.
There’s a striking statistic right at the start, which cites at least six supporting studies: “[M]ost surveyed participants all over the world endorse at least one conspiracy theory.” The cited studies predate the COVID-19 pandemic, which spawned a handful of pretty major conspiracy theories by itself (like this one). One reason a meta analysis of literature may be especially useful now is because we’re likely to see a swell of research on these specific conspiracy theories in the years to come. Establishing an occasional status quo or baseline in the field can help those researchers in the future.
How do you combine “170 studies, 257 samples, 52 variables, 1,429 effect sizes, and 158,473 participants”? Bowes and her colleagues looked at two research questions in particular: “(a) What are the motivational correlates of conspiratorial ideation? (b) What are the personological correlates of conspiratorial ideation?”
Let’s unpack some of those terms. To “ideate” is to come up with and think about ideas, formed like the word formulate. The term “ideation” is used in medical contexts for people who think about suicide, homicide, or different subjects of paranoia, and Bowes is adding conspiratorial thinking to this list: “Conspiratorial ideation, therefore, refers to a tendency to endorse conspiracy theories.” A “correlate” is just one thing that is part of a correlation, which is a relationship that shows a link. (Correlation is not the same as causation, as the saying goes.)
✅ Know Your Terms: Correlation vs. Causation
A correlation is a statistical measure that describes the size and direction of a relationship between two or more variables; however, a change in one variable is not necessarily the cause of a change in the other variables. That would land in the realm of causation, which proves a causal relationship between two events. So in a hypothetical scenario, there might be a correlation between the Gen Z age group and believing in conspiracy theories at a higher rate than other age groups, but that does not necessarily mean that being young causes you to believe in conspiracy theories. Unfettered internet access from a young age could be one possible explanation, but age in and of itself does not explain the cause and effect.
And what is a conspiracy theory? We can all recognize and label them, but what defines them, and how can researchers use criteria to draw a line that includes conspiracy theories and excludes other things? According to the paper: “Broadly, conspiracy theories refer to causal explanations of events that ascribe blame to a group of powerful individuals who operate in secret to form hidden plans that benefit themselves and harm the common good. Thus, the recipe of conspiracy theories involves three primary ingredients: (a) conspirators, (b) hidden plans, and (c) malintent against others or society.”
So in the meta analysis, Bowes is looking for examples of motivations and personality traits that correlate to, or coincide with, belief in theories that have these three qualities. What are the markers of the person who is most likely to believe in a conspiracy theory? Are they a particular age, gender, or race? What is their family background or their level of education? Are they seeking community, trying to feel special, or something else? Each individual study has a guiding question like this, and Bowes and her team can categorize the guiding questions as either motivations or personality classifications.
“[S]ocial motives were most frequently assessed, followed by epistemic motives, [and] existential motives,” they conclude. Social motives include a statistically strong relationship with “more collective narcissism” and “perceiving outgroup members as threatening,” as well as anomie, which is a sense of pointlessness or alienation. Strongly related epistemic motives, where “epistemic” refers to the pursuit of knowledge, include delusion-proneness and anthropomorphism (where you give human qualities and motivations to non-human things and beings). Strongly related existential motives include belief in a “dangerous world” and fear of an existential threat.
These three categories support an existing idea in the field of conspiracy theory psychology called the tripartite model. “Overall, the results corroborate the tripartite model’s core hypothesis that (a) a need to understand one’s environment, (b) a need to feel secure and safe in one’s environment, and (c) a need to maintain a superior, but fragile, image of oneself and one’s ingroup predict conspiratorial ideation when these needs are deprived.”
This meta-analysis is designed to offer other researchers an accurate portrait of what studies in this field are finding; it has no agenda other than to distill existing research. But what it shows is interesting to me, personally, as someone who has also followed the psychology of politics.
“On the whole, the research shows, conservatives desire security, predictability and authority more than liberals do, and liberals are more comfortable with novelty, nuance and complexity,” Lydia Denworth summarized for Scientific American in 2020. Again, these ideas do not represent any agenda other than the pursuit of knowledge through the scientific method. Nothing is inherently wrong or right about wanting to feel secure or appreciating complexity.
But the qualities represented by the conspiracy theory study as well as the overall findings of political psychology can show us ways in which people’s underlying motivations and feelings can manifest. Indeed, it can also show why communication may be so difficult. The language we use is like a many-branching tree, in which each word or phrase—let alone those loaded with political and personal meaning—can correspond to dozens of linked ideas and underlying principles. A word is an imperfect structure to describe a feeling or idea.
Indeed, this is close to where Bowes has landed. “Bowes said that future research should be conducted with an awareness that conspiratorial thinking is complicated, and that there are important and diverse variables that should be explored in the relations among conspiratorial thinking, motivation and personality to understand the overall psychology behind conspiratorial ideas,” the American Psychological Association says in a press release.
Caroline Delbert is a writer, avid reader, and contributing editor at Pop Mech. She’s also an enthusiast of just about everything. Her favorite topics include nuclear energy, cosmology, math of everyday things, and the philosophy of it all.
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