What kind of person is it that supports conspiracy theories?

The Earth is flat, man did not set foot on the Moon, the trails of the planes spray the population with chemical agents, and the climate change is a secret plan to depopulate the world, they are all different ideas but with one thing in common: they are conspiracy theories.

And although all of them have been dismantled by the scientific community with proven evidence and data, millions of people across the planet blindly believe in any of these theories, but why? How are the people who defend and support these hoaxes?

Well, there is no simple answer: the success of conspiracy theories lies in a complex combination of personality traits and motivations.

According to a study published this Monday by the American Psychological Association, the people most likely to believe in these theories are those who fully trust their intuition, have a feeling of antagonism and superiority towards others and perceive threats in their environment.

Contrary to popular belief, “Conspiracyists are not simple or mentally ill people” but they are individuals who resort to these theories “to satisfy their lack of motivation and make sense of their personal anguish”explained Shauna Bowes, a researcher at Emory University and lead author of the study.

Until now, research on what drives conspiracists has largely focused on personality and motivation separately, but Bowes’ study examines these factors together to arrive at a more unified explanation of why people believe theories. conspiratorial.

Security and Superiority

For the study, the team used data from 170 studies with more than 158,000 participants, primarily from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Poland, and focused on those that measured participants’ motivations or personality traits associated with conspiratorial thinking.

The researchers found that people were generally motivated to believe in conspiracy theories by a need to understand and feel safe in their environment, and by a need to feel that the community they identify with is superior to others.

Although many conspiracy theories seem to shed light and offer a supposed secret truth about confusing events, the need for closure or a sense of control were not the strongest motivations behind them.

The researchers found that people were more likely to believe certain conspiracies when they were motivated by social relationships.

For example, participants who perceived social threats were more likely to believe event-based conspiracy theories, such as the theory that the US government planned the 9/11 terrorist attacks, rather than an abstract theory that, in Governments generally plan to harm their citizens in order to retain power.

According to Bowes“These results are largely in line with a recent theoretical framework advancing that social identity motives may lead to being attracted to the content of a conspiracy theory, while people motivated by the desire to feel unique are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories generals about the workings of the world.

The researchers also found that people with certain personality traits, such as a feeling of antagonism towards others and high levels of paranoia, were more likely to believe in conspiracy theories.

Those who strongly believed in conspiracy theories were also more likely to be insecure, paranoid, emotionally volatile, impulsive, suspicious, withdrawn, manipulative, self-centered, and eccentric.

The Big Five personality traits—extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism—were significantly less associated with conspiratorial thinking, though for the researchers that doesn’t mean the general personality traits are irrelevant to the tendency to believe in conspiracy theories.

Bowes believes that future research should be conducted with the understanding that conspiratorial thinking is complicated and that there are several important variables that should be explored in the relationships between conspiratorial thinking, motivation, and personality in order to understand the general psychology underlying conspiracy thinking. conspiracy ideas.

Source: EFE