Believing in hidden plots is associated with decreased behavioral trust: Conspiracy belief as greater sensitivity to social threat or insensitivity towards its absence?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2020.104081Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Conspiracy beliefs were related to less investments (and outcomes) in trust games.

  • Participants invested less points if co-players exhibited social threat (angry expression).

  • We found no support that conspiracy beliefs were related to social threat perception.

Abstract

Past research has demonstrated that conspiracy belief is linked to a low level of self-reported general trust. In four experimental online studies (total N = 1105) we examined whether this relationship translated into actual behavior. Specifically, since the decision to trust relies on the ability to detect potential social threat, we tested whether conspiracy believers are better at detecting actual threat, worse at detecting the absence of threat, or simply trust less, irrespective of any social cue. To this end, participants played multiple, independent rounds of the trust game, a behavioral measure for interpersonal trust. We manipulated social threat by presenting photographs of their alleged trustees with varying intensity of facial anger. In three of the four studies, trustors' conspiracy beliefs predicted a more cautious investment behavior in the trust game. This association, however, was not contingent on the social threat posed by the trustee. The present research thus joins a number of studies demonstrating that conspiracy beliefs can – under certain circumstances - influence everyday behavior.

Section snippets

Conspiracy beliefs and interpersonal trust

Conspiracy theories are commonly defined as alternative explanations of past or current phenomena, which accuse a group of powerful individuals of acting in secret to achieve selfish, malevolent goals (Imhoff & Lamberty, 2020a; Swami & Furnham, 2014). Such theories are widespread (Graumann & Moscovici, 1987; Grebe & Nattrass, 2012; Kuzio, 2011; Oliver & Wood, 2014; Swami, 2012), can be highly persuasive (Douglas & Sutton, 2015; Stojanov, 2015) and cover a wide range of topics (e.g., politics,

Conspiracy beliefs and social threat detection

As mentioned above, the decision to trust depends not only on stable dispositions of the trustor, but also on the specific trust situation, that is, particularly on the perceived trustworthiness of the trustee in question (Thielmann & Hilbig, 2015). To decide whether to trust or not, people rely on other people's reputation or overt signals, but arguably in most situations they lack such meta-information. When interacting with strangers, people thus have to infer their interaction partners'

The present research

In four experimental online studies, we examined whether conspiracy beliefs are associated with a more cautious interpersonal trust behavior (H1) and whether such beliefs may be functional (high sensitivity for threat; H2) or dysfunctional (low sensitivity for the absence of threat; H3) for detecting cues of social threat. The general procedure of all studies was that participants played multiple independent rounds of the trust game with simulated players. To be able to make an informed

General discussion

Past research consistently demonstrated that conspiracy beliefs are associated with a low level of self-reported interpersonal trust (Lamberty, 2016). Up to now, however, it has not yet been shown whether this connection manifests itself in actual behavior indicative of trust. Since trust behavior may be seen as a nuanced reaction to cues of (un)trustworthiness in a trustee in question, we conducted four experimental online studies to examine whether conspiracy believers are more sensitive to

Conclusion

The extent to which people are attracted to conspiracy theories predicted how little trust they put in unknown others in a concrete trust situation. Importantly, we found this relationship in a context, where the given trustees were not presented as particularly powerful. The present research thus joins a number of studies demonstrating that conspiracy beliefs can influence everyday behavior. Under which specific circumstances this relationship applies, and whether social threat detection plays

Author note

Study 1 is based on the first author's master thesis under the second author's supervision. The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest. This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. All procedures performed in the present study were in accordance with the ethical guidelines specified in the APA Code of Conduct as well as the authors' national ethics guidelines. The authors would like to thank

Open practices

All preregistrations, materials and data are openly accessible on the Open Science Framework (see osf.io/guqn5).

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