Researchers identify personality profiles of conspiracy theorists

And who’s gonna trust these ‘researchers’? I do my own research!

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The preprint of the paper says

All participants completed an online battery of self-report measures. Internal consistencies and intercorrelations are presented in Supplemental Tables 1 through 7.

Conspiratorial ideation. In Samples 1 through 3, the Belief in Conspiracy Theories Inventory (BCTI; Swami et al., 2011) was administered. The BCTI is a 15-item self-report inventory of belief in specific conspiracy theories (e.g., “U.S. agencies intentionally created the AIDS epidemic and administered it to Black and gay men in the 1970s”), wherein participants endorse their level of belief via a 1 ( completely false ) to 6 ( completely true ) Likert-type scale. Exploratory factor analyses suggest that the BCTI is unidimensional (Swami et al., 2010).

In Sample 4, participants completed two self-report measures of conspiratorial thinking: the Generic Conspiracist Beliefs Scale (GCBS; Brotherton, French, & Pickering, 2013) and Vaccine Conspiracy Theories Scale (VCBS; Shapiro et al., 2016). The GCBS is a 15-item self-report measure of beliefs in general conspiracy theories that yields a total score in addition to five factor scores: Government Malfeasance (e.g., “Government agencies have been secretly involved in the assassinations of their own citizens”), Extraterrestrial Threat (e.g., “Evidence of alien presence on Earth is being covered up”), Malevolent Global Conspiracy (e.g., “A small, secret group of people is actually in control of the world economy”), Personal Wellbeing (e.g., “Cures for certain deadly and common diseases exist, but are being deliberately withheld”), and Control of Information (e.g., “New and advanced technology which would harm current industry is being suppressed”). In this study, we used the GCBS total score in all analyses (but see Supplemental Tables 8 and 9 for the correlations between the GCBS subdimensions and study outcomes). Participants indicated the degree to which they agreed with each item on a 1 ( definitely not true ) to 5 ( definitely true ) Likert-type scale. The VCBS is a 7-item self-report measure of belief in vaccine-related conspiracy theories (e.g., “The government is trying to cover up the link between vaccines and autism”), and participants indicated their agreement with each statement on a 1 ( strongly disagree ) to 7 ( strongly agree ) Likert-type scale.

I don’t imagine that the peer review process had anything to add, but the published version is definitive; preprints aren’t

https://psyarxiv.com/9pv38/

The new York Times helpfully adds

The study had two elements. First, the team rated each person on their level proclivity for conspiracy theories. Participants were asked to rate the probable veracity of general statements such as “Some U.F.O. sightings and rumors are planned or staged in order to distract the public from real alien contact” or “The government uses people as patsies to hide its involvement in criminal activity.” The volunteers were then asked do the same for statements about specific events, such as “U.S. agencies intentionally created the AIDS epidemic and administered it to Black and gay men in the 1970s.”

You can take the GCBS test online, should you suspect yourself.

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Perhaps a better term is “Personality Deviations”, or just “deviants”?

Me, I am mulling just calling them “Character Eristics”, after the modern interpretation of Eris, goddess of discord.

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The thing about religions is that as far as conspiracy theories go, they are exclusionary and will try to inoculate their followers against competing theories. But it can only go so far, lest the person being inoculated also rejects the desired conspiracy theory.

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they would occasionlly hve guest speakers warning us to be on the lookout for people trying to sell us on complicated systems of belief

Just going to humbly submit that my bank, my sports team, my employer, etc has never felt a need to educate their given flocks on this topic. There are Southern churches as robust social institutions, and the value of joining one is self evident: they have the best gyms in town, good people, stuff to do. Then there’s churches that are selling a cult of victimization out on the edge of town, and they attract a certain kind of mind.

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This topic has reminded me of this excellent post from a previous thread:

Of course, the history of conspiratorial thinking in public life has a long and colourful history:

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Ok, this is a caricature of a certain type. But what about people who are truly just trying to figure out what’s going on.

I mean, someone conspired to do 9/11. Someone conspired to fake the Gulf of Tonkin attack. Someone conspired to game the ratings agencies and create and burst a massive asset bubble in 2008. Someone conspired to cook the intelligence on WMD in Iraq. Someone conspired to send weapons grade anthrax to US Senators in 2001. We may not know WHO these conspirators are, but they exist.

It’s basically impossible to investigate any of these events (which changed the course of our history and the mentality of our society!) without dealing with conspiracies of various sizes and types. By no means were all these things done by one shadowy group who is orchestrating world events in a god-like way, but they were done by SOMEONE, right?

What about people who carefully and sincerely investigate these things? Are they conspiracy theorists?

this is 40+ years in the past but, iirc, those guest speakers had been brought in as a response to revivalist speakers at some of the larger churches in town (first baptist, calvary baptist) who were selling the illuminati or the rapture to their, at least temporarily, enlarged flocks. looking back at it from today it seems almost quaint for a church to try to sell sanity as a reason for worshipping with them.

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Not all conspiracies are theoretical. Here’s a PDF someone drew up recently categorising them (room for argument about what fits where, but a reasonable starting point):

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It appears in more recent history that a specific group of people was deliberately targeted thanks to the wonders of surveillance capitalism.

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The difference between real “conspiracies” (if they can even be called such) and what is meant by “conspiracy theories” is largely the number of people that would need to be involved. The 9/11 hijackers were a small group of people, and as far as we can tell, the anthrax sender was a single person. It isn’t unreasonable to imagine that they could keep their actions a secret. Compare that to the thousands (or even millions) of people needed to fake the moon landing or fake 9/11 with explosives. All of whom apparently have kept their silence for decades.

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I actually thought about that years ago. I think they’d sniff out my disdain for their religion pretty quickly, though.

My favorite graphic for conspiracy theorists.

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In military strategy, there’s a notion of “fog of war”. A tactician doesn’t always know the strength of his adversary. He might not even know where his own troops are. Messages aren’t always transmitted at the speed of light.

Conspiracies often assume a robust command and control network where none actually exists. They assume perfect knowledge when the opposite is just as likely.

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Like if all the members of a political party were to knowingly echo the lies and cover up the evil deeds of a single man who wants to take down society? /s (?)

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For the most part Trumpies agree that 45 has done a lot of bad things. They just don’t care because they see that as a low price for all the pain he’s caused the “liberal elite”.

Hey you guys!! I found the illuminati!!!

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And I also hear them repeat “Trump’s looking out for the average/working man/misfire class” yet there is a mountain of evidence in his own words, deeds and those of reporters, encompassing Trump’s entire adult life, that the exact opposite is the truth.

at best, he’s a friend of a friend of the working class.

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Operation Gladio was definitely real, stayed hidden for 40 years and could well have involved 1000’s in one way or another. But I don’t think the difference is numbers, it’s a qualitative difference, not a quantitative difference. To the extent that the Deep State does, or does not exist in Turkey, we can be pretty certain it bears little or no resemblance to the Deep State conjured in the imaginations of QAnon believers.

It should be no big surprise to find out that narcissism and paranoid ideation are two of the traits identified in the paper. Conspiracy theorizing resembles nothing as much as a desperate search for an explanation, any explanation, rather than except there isn’t any single one, that the world is run through a seething mess of accident, inertia and conflicting power interests for the most part shortsighted and entirely self-centered (much like real conspiracies).

Under the belief in a shadowy conspiracy that runs the world is its twin the pure, uncorrupted opposite system, bringing about justice that would exist if it had not been corrupted so (and scarcely more believable). Its possible to argue that the problem with conspiracy theorists is not that they go too far, too deep, but that they don’t go far enough: there’s no conspiracy, its just business as usual.

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