ArticleScientific reports2023
On modeling the correlates of conspiracy thinking.
Article in Scientific reports, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Beneath the Surface of Unfounded Belief Systems: An Extended Test of the Dimensionality Hypothesis.Scandinavian journal of psychology · 2026Article
- Conspiratorial thinking in a 50-state survey of American adults.Journal of affective disorders · 2025Article
- Information from social ties predicts conspiracy beliefs: Evidence from the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Utilizing machine learning to identify fall predictors in India's aging population: findings from the LASI.BMC geriatrics · 2025Article
- The sociodemographic correlates of conspiracism.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Article
- Justifying an Invasion: When Is Disinformation Successful?Political communication · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
While a robust literature on the psychology of conspiracy theories has identified dozens of characteristics correlated with conspiracy theory beliefs, much less attention has been paid to understanding the generalized predisposition towards interpreting events and circumstances as the product of supposed conspiracies. Using a unique national survey of 2015 U.S. adults from October 2020, we investigate the relationship between this predisposition-conspiracy thinking-and 34 different psychological, political, and social correlates. Using conditional inference tree modeling-a machine learning-based approach designed to facilitate prediction using a flexible modeling methodology-we identify the characteristics that are most useful for orienting individuals along the conspiracy thinking continuum, including (but not limited to): anomie, Manicheanism, support for political violence, a tendency to share false information online, populism, narcissism, and psychopathy. Altogether, psychological characteristics are much more useful in predicting conspiracy thinking than are political and social characteristics, though even our robust set of correlates only partially accounts for variance in conspiracy thinking.
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Registered trials
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