ArticleScientific reports2022
The psychological and political correlates of conspiracy theory beliefs.
Article in Scientific reports, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Dual Impact of Believing and Spreading Conspiracy Theories: Independent and Interactive Effects on Social Perceptions and Orientations.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2026Article
- Does repetition increase perceived truth equally for conspiracy and trivia statements? A registered replication report.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- Article
- Evaluating the psychometric properties of the Generic Conspiracist Beliefs Scale: a Rasch modelling approach.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Conspiratorial thinking in a 50-state survey of American adults.Journal of affective disorders · 2025Article
- Victims of Conspiracies? An Examination of the Relationship Between Conspiracy Beliefs and Dispositional Individual Victimhood.European journal of social psychology · 2025Article
- Conspiracy beliefs predict perceptions of procedural justice.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Science populism impacts perceptions of credibility across scientific professions.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- From information to action: modelling social and cognitive factors in health decisions.BMC public health · 2025Article
- Is there anything good about conspiracy beliefs? Belief in COVID-19 conspiracy theories is associated with benefits to well-being.PloS one · 2025Article
- Association between beliefs in medical conspiracy theories and health behaviors among medical and healthcare students. Implications for professional practice.BMC medical education · 2024Article
- Leveraging artificial intelligence to identify the psychological factors associated with conspiracy theory beliefs online.Nature communications · 2024Article
- The sociodemographic correlates of conspiracism.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- People do change their beliefs about conspiracy theories-but not often.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Article
- Correlation between coronavirus conspiracism and antisemitism: a cross-sectional study in the United Kingdom.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- On modeling the correlates of conspiracy thinking.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Dark Triad and COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy: the role of conspiracy beliefs and risk perception.Current psychology (New Brunswick, N.J.) · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
11 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Understanding the individual-level characteristics associated with conspiracy theory beliefs is vital to addressing and combatting those beliefs. While researchers have identified numerous psychological and political characteristics associated with conspiracy theory beliefs, the generalizability of those findings is uncertain because they are typically drawn from studies of only a few conspiracy theories. Here, we employ a national survey of 2021 U.S. adults that asks about 15 psychological and political characteristics as well as beliefs in 39 different conspiracy theories. Across 585 relationships examined within both bivariate (correlations) and multivariate (regression) frameworks, we find that psychological traits (e.g., dark triad) and non-partisan/ideological political worldviews (e.g., populism, support for violence) are most strongly related to individual conspiracy theory beliefs, regardless of the belief under consideration, while other previously identified correlates (e.g., partisanship, ideological extremity) are inconsistently related. We also find that the correlates of specific conspiracy theory beliefs mirror those of conspiracy thinking (the predisposition), indicating that this predisposition operates like an 'average' of individual conspiracy theory beliefs. Overall, our findings detail the psychological and political traits of the individuals most drawn to conspiracy theories and have important implications for scholars and practitioners seeking to prevent or reduce the impact of conspiracy theories.
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