Four large studies among U.S. adults found consistent evidence that conservatives are more likely than liberals to endorse conspiracy thinking. This effect was explained by a distrust in officials and paranoid tendencies. The findings were published in Political Psychology.
Past research has linked belief in conspiracy theories to negative consequences, such as antisocial behavior, prompting researchers to delve into the role of ideology in conspiracy thinking. Some scholars have suggested that conspiracy thinking is equally prevalent at both extremes of the political spectrum, with both leftists and rightists endorsing their share of conspiracy beliefs.
Study authors Sander van der Linden and colleagues aimed to explore this idea within the American political landscape.
“The fact that “conspiracy theories are not just for conservatives” (Moore et al., 2014) does not mean that conspiracies are endorsed at the same scale or level of intensity by liberals and conservatives nor that conspiracy theories on the left and right are equally harmful, fallacious, or driven by paranoid ideation,” van der Linden and team say.
Four large, national surveys explored the prevalence of a general conspiracy mindset and specific belief in conspiracies about climate change among American adults. The surveys also included measures of distrust in officials and paranoid thinking.
All four studies found consistent and compelling evidence that conservatives were more likely than liberals to endorse a general conspiracy mentality and belief in a global warming conspiracy. This was true even in two studies that included a variety of assessments for political ideology, in addition to participants’ self-disclosed ideology. In other words, no matter how it was measured, conservatism was associated with increased belief in conspiracies.
Further, all four studies found that conservatives were more likely to show distrust in officials (e.g., scientists, government, traditional news and media) than liberals. Moreover, distrust in officials and paranoid ideation mediated the relationship between conservatism and conspiracy belief.
Van der Linden and colleagues found little evidence to suggest that conspiracy thinking was equally prevalent among liberals and conservatives.
“Extreme liberals were not as likely as extreme conservatives to adopt a conspiratorial mindset, although it is possible that extreme liberals would be more motivated than moderate liberals to embrace some conspiracy theories . . . Importantly, this pattern of ideological asymmetry applied to conspiratorial thinking in general as well as belief in an ideologically congenial conspiracy theory, namely, the conspiracy theory that global warming is a hoax,” the researchers share.
The authors discuss their concerns regarding the heightened paranoia they found in some respondents.
“As Hofstadter (1964) pointed out, there are some troubling implications of the paranoid style for the stable functioning of liberal-democratic societies—insofar as some level of political trust is required for citizens to share power with and consent to being governed by others with whom they disagree (see also Morisi, Jost, & Singh, 2019),” the researchers note.
One limitation of the study was that it was centered in the United States, specifically around the time of Donald Trump’s leadership. As the authors share, there is empirical evidence to suggest that conservatism is more tightly linked with conspiracy belief in the U.S. compared to the rest of the world.
“In future research, it would be important—for theoretical and practical reasons—to determine the extent to which left-right ideological asymmetries operate in contexts outside of the United States,” Van der Linden and team say.
The study, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics Revisited: An Ideological Asymmetry in Conspiratorial Thinking”, was authored by Sander van der Linden, Costas Panagopoulos, Flávio Azevedo, and John T. Jost.
