A large-scale project involving over 100,000 people from 26 countries concluded that conspiracy mentality was associated with extreme left- and right-wing beliefs, and that this effect was stronger among voters of opposition parties (i.e., voters deprived of political control). This research was published in Nature Human Behavior.
Conspiracy theories are defined “as beliefs that a group of actors are colluding in secret to reach a malevolent goal are common across times, cultures and populations”, and surge online during major events. Belief in one conspiracy theory is predictive of others. ‘Conspiracy mindset’ captures the “general propensity to suspect that conspiracies are at play, both uncontaminated by concrete events, actors or contexts,” and belief in conspiracy theories predicts voting intentions and behavior, as well as non-normative political action.
Numerous studies point to a positive association between authoritarian worldviews and conspiracy mentality. While some studies suggest conspiracy beliefs are more common among the political right than left, others have found a U-shaped association between conspiracy mentality and political orientation, whereby both political extremes endorse conspiracy mentality to a greater extent than the political centre.
One possible explanation for a U-shaped relation is that political movements on either extreme share common features, including a tendency to distrust or reject groups or ideas that do not coincide with one’s own. Another reason to explain a U-shaped function may be political control deprivation prompted by losing elections, such that one’s political values are not represented in governmental decisions. Roland Imhoff and colleagues write, “when people feel locked out of power, they may be more motivated to endorse beliefs that delegitimize incumbent authorities and the outcomes of political processes.”
In this work, the authors “sought to provide more definitive evidence regarding the nature, universality and explanations of the relationship between political orientation and conspiracy mentality, the mindset that secret sinister forces are at play.” Study 1 examined the association between political orientation and conspiracy mentality in 33,431 participants from 213 countries, allowing the researchers to test this link “in a more generalizable and fine-grained manner” and to study whether deprivation of political control explained the association. Study 2 included 70,882 participants from 13 European countries, allowing for “weighting of data to match population-based distributions of age, gender, education and political leaning.”
Political orientation was measured in two ways. First, participants provided ratings on a single item that ranged from ‘extremely left wing’ to ‘extremely right wing’ (i.e., “In politics, people talk of ‘the left’ and the ‘the right’. How would you place your own views on a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 is ‘left’ and 10 is ‘right’?”). As a second method, the authors relied on participants’ voting intentions for political parties.
Imhoff and colleagues found that across 26 countries and over 100,000 people, there was a consistent association between political orientation and conspiracy mentality. On either political extreme, respondents reported more “pronounced beliefs that the world is governed by secret forces operating in the dark.” Those who supported parties that were not represented in the government exhibited higher levels of conspiracy mentality, providing support for a “political deprivation” explanation of the findings. Controlling for whether one’s preferred party was in power did not change the observed U-shaped trend, “allowing the speculation that individual levels of conspiracy mentality are at least partly associated with one’s general worldview.”
The authors report that control deprivation was associated with greater conspiracy mentality almost “exclusively for the (extreme) political right.” As well, there was “support for greater conspiracy mentality among people with lower levels of education.” However, political orientation was associated with a conspiracy mentality even after controlling for education.
One limitation is that the overall effect sizes were modest. Supporting a non-governmental party and having a low education had a larger association with conspiracy mentality than did political orientation. The researchers write, “Although it was not reducible to either of the two, its contribution to the prediction of conspiracy mentality was overall modest.”
The research, “Conspiracy mentality and political orientation across 26 countries”, was authored by Roland Imhoff, Felix Zimmer, Olivier Klein, João H. C. António, Maria Babinska, Adrian Bangerter, Michal Bilewicz, Nebojša Blanuša, Kosta Bovan, Rumena Bužarovska, Aleksandra Cichocka, Sylvain Delouvée, Karen M. Douglas, Asbjørn Dyrendal, Tom Etienne, Biljana Gjoneska, Sylvie Graf, Estrella Gualda, Gilad Hirschberger, Anna Kende, Yordan Kutiyski, Peter Krekó, Andre Krouwel, Silvia Mari, Jasna Milošević Đorđević, Maria Serena Panasiti, Myrto Pantazi, Ljupcho Petkovski, Giuseppina Porciello, André Rabelo, Raluca Nicoleta Radu, Florin A. Sava, Michael Schepisi, Robbie M. Sutton, Viren Swami, Hulda Thórisdóttir, Vladimir Turjačanin, Pascal Wagner-Egger, Iris Žeželj and Jan-Willem van Prooijen.
