People support conspiracy theories because of a complex combination of personality traits, motivations.
People may be prone to believe in conspiracy theories due to a combination of personality traits and motivations, including strong reliance on their intuition, a sense of antagonism and superiority over others, and a perception of threats in their environment, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.
The study results present a nuanced picture of what drives conspiracy theorists, according to lead author Shauna Bowes, a doctoral student in clinical psychology at Emory University.
“Conspiracy theorists are not likely to be all simple-minded and mentally ill people – a portrait routinely painted in popular culture. Instead, many turn to conspiracy theories to fulfill deprived motivational needs and to make sense of distress and harm.”, said Bowes.
The research was published online in the journal Psychological bulletin.
Previous research on what drives conspiracy theorists has looked at personality and motivation separately, according to Bowes. The current study aimed to examine these factors together to arrive at a more unified account of why people believe in conspiracy theories.
To do this, the researchers analyzed data from 170 studies involving over 158,000 participants, mostly from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Poland. They focused on studies that measured participants' motivations or personality traits associated with conspiratorial thinking.
The researchers found that in general, people were motivated to believe in conspiracy theories by a need to understand and feel safe in their environment and a need to feel that the community they identify with is superior to others.
Although many conspiracy theories seem to offer clarity or a supposed secret truth about confusing events, the need for closure or a sense of control were not the strongest motivators for adopting conspiracy theories. Instead, the researchers found some evidence that people were more likely to believe specific conspiracy theories when they were motivated by social relationships. For example, participants who perceived social threats were more likely to believe event-based conspiracy theories, such as the theory that the U.S. government planned the September 11 terrorist attacks, than an abstract theory that, in general, governments plan to harm their citizens to maintain power.
"These results are largely consistent with a recent theoretical framework that suggests that social identity motives can drive the appeal of conspiracy theory content, with people who are motivated by a desire to feel unique being more likely to believe in general conspiracy theories about how the world works.", Bowes said.
The researchers also found that people with certain personality traits, such as a sense of antagonism toward others and high levels of paranoia, were more likely to believe conspiracy theories. Those who strongly believed in conspiracy theories were also more likely to be insecure, paranoid, emotionally unstable, impulsive, suspicious, withdrawn, manipulative, self-centered, and eccentric.
The Big Five personality traits (extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness and neuroticism) had a much weaker relationship with conspiratorial thinking, although the researchers said this does not mean that general personality traits are irrelevant to a tendency to believe in conspiracy theories.
Bowes said future research should be conducted with the awareness that conspiratorial thinking is complex and that there are important and different variables that need to be explored in the relationships between conspiratorial thinking, motivation, and personality to understand the overall psychology behind conspiratorial ideas.
Article: “The Conspiratorial Mind: A Meta-Analytic Review of Motivational and Personological Links,” by Shauna Bowes, MA, and Arber Tasimi, PhD, Emory University, and Thomas Costello, PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Psychological Bulletin, published June 26, 2023.
Shih here article published in the American Psychological Association, written by Shauna Bowes