Everyone’s a Conspiracy Theorist! By James Reed

See, it is not just people like me who embrace conspiracy theories; everyone does. According to a new article in the journal Psychological Bulletin, people believe in conspiracy theories to feel safe about their environment, and make sewnse of their world. That is the result of a meta-analysis, an overview of other published research. While that is fine, the presumption here is that such conspiracy theories are still false. Yet, in fact, most conspiracy theories are in fact true, seen over a longer time period. Thus, the Covid lab leak hypothesis was dismissed by the mainstream at the time of he virus release, perhaps to let communist china of the hook, but when the origins became a cold case and the damage was done, the narrative switched from natural origins to the lab release. What was a conspiracy one day, another becomes accepted reality.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a44579618/who-believes-conspiracy-theories/

“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.)

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.”

https://phys.org/news/2023-06-simple-people-conspiracy-theories.html