Going through difficult life events does not directly push people into adopting conspiracy theories, but it can reshape how they view the fairness of the world. A new set of experiments suggests that when people experience personal hardships, they tend to view the world as an unjust place, which then makes conspiratorial ideas more appealing. These findings, published in the British Journal of Psychology, provide evidence that subjective feelings of injustice act as a bridge between lifetime adversity and a conspiracy mindset.
Conspiracy mentality is a broad psychological tendency to believe that important global or societal events are the result of secret, malevolent plots by powerful groups. This mindset often predicts whether someone will endorse specific theories, such as claims that scientists hide medical data for financial gain. Endorsing these ideas has real-world consequences, often influencing whether people accept vaccines or support climate action.
Previous research into the origins of conspiracy beliefs has focused heavily on collective trauma. When groups of people face historical oppression or discrimination based on their race, sexuality, or social identity, they often develop a justified distrust of institutions. That group-based discrimination is known to foster a conspiracy mindset. But fewer studies have examined isolated, individual hardships, such as serious illnesses, financial ruin, or physical accidents.
Individuals who go through personal traumas often experience a shattered sense of self-worth and a damaged belief in the goodness of others. The researchers wanted to understand whether these personal hardships, which are entirely unrelated to a person’s social group, could also make conspiracy theories more appealing. They theorized that personal adversity might disrupt a person’s assumption that the world is fair, making them search for alternative explanations to make sense of their suffering.
“We were interested in understanding the journey from experiencing adversity to potentially developing conspiracy beliefs,” said Daniel Jolley, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Nottingham. Jolley collaborated on the project with Laura Blackie, an assistant professor of psychology at the same university.
“My research focuses on conspiracy theories, while Laura has expertise in lifetime adversity, so bringing these two areas together gave us an opportunity to look at what might happen in between the two,” Jolley said. “In particular, we wanted to understand whether difficult life experiences might change how people see the world, and whether this could help explain why conspiracy theories become more appealing to some people.”
To test these ideas, the researchers conducted three separate studies. In the first study, they recruited 275 participants through an online platform. The participants completed surveys measuring their cumulative lifetime adversity, which tallied up how many adverse events they had experienced out of a possible 35, ranging from natural disasters to relationship stress.
The participants also answered questions about their recent economic hardships over the past six months. Finally, they completed questionnaires assessing how unjust they felt the world was and their overall conspiracy mentality.
The authors found no direct link between cumulative lifetime adversity and conspiracy mentality. They did, however, find a direct link between recent economic hardship and conspiracy thinking.
More importantly, both types of hardship were positively associated with stronger beliefs that the world is an unfair and unjust place. This increased sense of injustice was, in turn, positively associated with higher levels of conspiracy mentality.
“The main takeaway is that the relationship between lifetime adversity and conspiracy beliefs is more nuanced than simply saying that experiencing hardship makes people more likely to believe conspiracy theories,” Jolley told PsyPost.
He noted that the majority of people who go through tough times do not automatically embrace conspiratorial thinking.
“Our findings suggest that perceptions of injustice may be an important part of this relationship, it is not simply what happens to people, but how those experiences shape the way they see the world,” Jolley said. “Most people who experience adversity do not go on to believe conspiracy theories, so understanding this psychological pathway is important.”
The second study utilized a controlled comparison design to look at one specific, intense form of personal adversity, which was violent crime. The researchers recruited 458 participants, comparing 232 people who had been victims of a violent crime to 226 people who had never been victims of any crime.
To ensure they were looking at personal trauma rather than group-based discrimination, the scientists restricted the sample to people who identified as cisgender, heterosexual, White, and who were employed residents of the United Kingdom.
Similar to the first study, the victims of violent crime did not report directly higher levels of conspiracy mentality compared to non-victims. However, the victims reported much higher perceptions of injustice.
The researchers found an indirect relationship, where victimhood predicted higher feelings of injustice, and those feelings of injustice predicted a stronger conspiracy mentality. This indirect link held up even when the scientists controlled for demographic variables like age, gender, and education status.
In the third study, the scientists wanted to see if they could experimentally manipulate feelings of injustice. They recruited 538 employed adults from the United Kingdom. The participants first reported their lifetime adversity.
Then, they were randomly assigned to read one of two mock news articles. One article claimed that British society was becoming increasingly fair, while the other claimed society was becoming increasingly unfair.
Participants were then asked to imagine how this societal fairness or unfairness would impact them personally in a hypothetical job interview. Finally, they answered questions about their conspiracy mentality, specific political conspiracy beliefs, and their trust in institutions like parliament, courts, and schools.
The manipulation worked, as participants who read the article about an unfair society felt their hypothetical job interview would be evaluated less fairly. These individuals also reported higher levels of both general conspiracy mentality and specific political conspiracy beliefs compared to those who read the article about a fair society.
On a seven-point scale, the group exposed to the injustice article scored an average of 5.60 in conspiracy mentality, compared to 4.85 in the justice group. The researchers also ran exploratory statistical models combining the data points. They found that cumulative lifetime adversity predicted feelings of general injustice. Those feelings of injustice predicted stronger political conspiracy beliefs, which then negatively predicted trust in mainstream institutions.
Although these studies offer a detailed look at how adversity shapes worldviews, there are limitations to how the data should be interpreted. The relationship between adversity and conspiracy beliefs in the first two studies is correlational, meaning the data cannot confirm that one variable directly causes the other.
“Clinical psychologists have long documented the detrimental impact of acute trauma on individuals’ worldviews,” Blackie said. “Our findings suggest that perceptions of unfairness in society might be one such detrimental outcome to result from adversity, and these perceptions may have consequences for the receptivity of conspiracy beliefs and trust in societal institutions.”
However, reverse causality is a possibility in these scenarios. People who already hold conspiratorial worldviews might be more inclined to interpret their past hardships and societal events through a lens of profound injustice, reinforcing their belief that the world is rigged against them.
“While our findings do not establish causality, they point to an important pathway through which adversity may shape how people view society,” Blackie said.
Another limitation involves how the researchers measured lifetime adversity. The questionnaire tallied the total number of adverse events a person experienced, assuming that a higher number of events equals a higher burden.
This counting method does not capture the subjective severity or emotional impact of each specific event. A person might experience a single, highly devastating event that alters their worldview more than several minor stressors would.
Future research could track individuals over a period of years to observe how life events, feelings of injustice, and conspiracy beliefs develop and influence each other over time in a longitudinal format.
The study, “The world is an unjust place: The impact of lifetime adversity on belief in conspiracy theories,” was authored by Daniel Jolley, Anna Maughan, and Laura E. R. Blackie.
