Are conspiracy theory believers drawn to conspiratorial explanations, alternatives explanations, or both?

Abstract

Individuals differ in their general propensity to believe in conspiracy theories, often referred to as conspiracy mentality. Because prototypical conspiracy theories exhibit a conspiratorial content (i.e., they claim that a conspiracy occurred) and an alternative status (i.e., they are rejected by authorities), it is unclear if conspiracy mentality captures a general tendency to believe in conspiracies, to endorse alternative narratives, or to believe in conspiratorial alternative narratives. To adjudicate between these interpretations, we carried out three experimental studies (Ns = 364, 772, 629) in which we experimentally manipulated the respective statuses (endorsed by authorities vs. rejected by the authorities) of competing conspiratorial and non-conspiratorial explanations for fictitious controversial events. Overall, conspiracy mentality predicted the endorsement of conspiratorial explanations and the rejection of non-conspiratorial explanations. However, these relationships were moderated by the respective statuses of these explanations. When authorities endorsed the conspiratorial explanation and rejected the non-conspiratorial explanation, the relationships were either nullified (in Studies 1 & 3) or attenuated (in study 2). These effects were driven by participants scoring low on the conspiracy mentality measures, who reported a lower endorsement of the conspiratorial explanation when it was rejected by authorities. They also reported a stronger endorsement of the non-conspiratorial explanation when it was presented as endorsed by authorities. By contrast, conspiracy believers' endorsement of the explanations was unaffected by their status. These findings are informative of what conspiracy mentality scales capture and highlight the need to adopt more specific definitions in psychological research on conspiracy theories.