Believing in hidden plots is associated with decreased behavioral trust: Conspiracy belief as greater sensitivity to social threat or insensitivity towards its absence?
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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Trust or distrust? Neither! The right mindset for confronting disinformation
2024, Current Opinion in PsychologyDo conspiracy theorists think too much or too little?
2023, Current Opinion in PsychologyCitation Excerpt :As Douglas and colleagues [41] note, “if people were simply being gullible, they would believe in all conspiracy theories, but it is clear that they do not” (p. 13). If anything, conspiracy theorists exhibit high levels of distrust: They assume that other people have bad intentions [42], perceive secret agreements behind both big and everyday events [43], and invest more cautiously in trust games [44]. Deep-seated suspicion likely benefited our ancestors, who evolved to spot hostile coalitions (actual conspiracies) [45].
The generic conspiracist beliefs scale – 5: A short-form measure of conspiracist ideation
2023, Journal of Research in PersonalityCitation Excerpt :In the present study, we considered data from two sources (i.e., self-report ratings and informant-report ratings), but other sources of data are worthy of exploration. The GCB-5 could, for example, be examined in relation to behavioural-based measures of interpersonal trust (e.g., the trust game; Meuer & Imhoff, 2021) or life-records-based measures of delusional ideation (e.g., a past psychiatric diagnosis of schizophrenia; Escolà-Gascón, 2022). Not only would this help ensure that the findings identified here are not specific to the exact method used, but it would also allow for a more comprehensive understanding of the nature of conspiracist ideation.
The psychological study of conspiracy theories: Strengths and limitations
2022, Current Opinion in PsychologyMalevolent intentions and secret coordination. Dissecting cognitive processes in conspiracy beliefs via diffusion modeling
2022, Journal of Experimental Social PsychologyCitation Excerpt :Theoretically, people who score high on conspiracy mentality are more likely to attribute events to the secret coordination of a small group of conspirators than to randomness or situational constraints. Although conspiracy mentality has been characterized as a deeply political generalized attitude (Imhoff & Bruder, 2014), it also radiates into the personal sphere (see van Prooijen et al., 2021) as conspiracy beliefs show robust associations with expressions of general interpersonal mistrust (Goertzel, 1994), and conspiracy mentality a greater tendency to perceive faces as untrustworthy (Frenken & Imhoff, 2022) and less behavioral trust towards unacquainted co-players (Meuer & Imhoff, 2021). From this perspective, endorsing conspiracy beliefs is much less about a specific conspiracy theory and a specific (political) context, but much more about a general suspicious style of how to perceive and explain the world.
Belief in conspiracy theories and non-normative behavior
2022, Current Opinion in Psychology