Reorienting the Study of Conspiratorial Thinking in Psychology: From Contaminated Mindware to Belief in Hidden Causal Forces

Abstract

In this study, we combined the perspectives of psychology and political science to study partisan conspiracy beliefs and to examine the predictors of belief in both true and false nonpartisan conspiracies. From political science, we explored the recently investigated variable of antiestablishment attitudes as well as two political attitudes unexplored in research on conspiratorial thinking: utopianism and government credulity. From psychology, we examined variables that have been consistent predictors in previous research on conspiracy belief: actively open-minded thinking, paranormal beliefs, and the Dark Triad. Actively open-minded thinking was a potent predictor of adaptive epistemic outcomes. We also included a scale derived and adapted from previous work on conspiratorial mentality that was designed to measure the broad-based conspiratorial thinking trait that we posit underlies most specific conspiracy beliefs: the Hidden Causal Forces scale. We found that the path model that best explained the observed correlations depends strongly on whether the conspiracy is partisan or nonpartisan and, in the case of nonpartisan conspiracies, whether the model seeks to explain implausible false conspiracy beliefs, true conspiracy beliefs, or the ability to discriminate between true and false conspiracies.