The Link between Conspiracy Mentality and Political Affiliation
Post by Megan McCullough
The takeaway
There is a relationship between political affiliation and the tendency to support conspiracy theories, with those on both the extreme left and the extreme right showing a greater conspiracy mentality than those in the political center.
What's the science?
Conspiracy mentality describes the tendency for individuals to endorse conspiracy theories, defined as beliefs that a certain group of people are secretly working together to achieve a malicious goal. Previous studies into the effect of political orientation on conspiracy mentality have shown a U-shaped relationship between political views and conspiracy mentality, suggesting that individuals at both political extremes have a higher tendency to support conspiracy theories than those in the political center. This week in Nature Human Behavior, Imhoff and colleagues used data from 26 countries to conduct the largest study to date into this relationship between political orientation and conspiracy mentality. The authors investigated the relationship between political affiliation and the tendency to support conspiracy theories while controlling for the theory that conspiracy mentality increases among a specific political party when their preferred political party is not in power.
How did they do it?
Data for this study came from two surveys that aimed to investigate the relationship between political leaning and conspiracy mentality. The first survey had a dataset from 23 countries and the second survey had samples from 13 countries, with over 100,000 surveyed individuals between the two surveys. Political orientation was measured using a self-reported scale that asked participants to rank themselves from extremely left-wing to extremely right-wing. Voting intentions were also gathered as a measure of political orientation. Both methods for determining political orientation were used because interpretations of right or left in a political context can be different across countries. Next, the Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire was administered to assess conspiracy mentality in each of the participants. To determine if perceived lack of political control was a factor in the U-shaped relationship seen in previous research, the authors of this study collected whether the preferred political party was in power at the time of data collection and used this along with demographic information as control variables.
What did they find?
The authors found a consistent relationship between political orientation and conspiracy mentality across the 26 countries of study. Individuals at the extreme ends of the political spectrum were more likely to believe in conspiracies compared to individuals in the middle. The U-shaped relationship was not symmetrical; conspiracy mentality tended to be higher for those on the far right. The authors also found that individuals who supported political parties not included in the current government of their countries were more likely to exhibit conspiracy mentality compared to individuals whose parties were included in government. However, the U-shaped relationship was still intact when this variable was controlled for. This shows that although a perceived loss of control of a political party does influence conspiracy mentality, there are other more important factors at play to explain increased conspiracy mentality at both ends of the political spectrum.
What's the impact?
This is the largest study to investigate the relationship between political orientation and conspiracy mentality. This research is important as it provides nuance into the psychology behind conspiracy mentalities and provides a greater understanding of the connection with political affiliation.
