[marginalium]
The epicenter of conspiracy belief
10 Apr 2025
The epicenter of conspiracy belief: The economically left-leaning and culturally regressive
the results show a clear picture: Individuals with economically left-wing and culturally conservative attitudes tend to score highest on conspiracy thinking. People at this ideological location seem to long for both economic and cultural protection and bemoan a “lost paradise” where equalities had not yet been destroyed by “perfidious” processes of cultural modernization and economic neoliberalism. This pattern is found across all countries and holds regardless of socioeconomic characteristics such as education and income. While previous research has found that belief in conspiracies tends to cluster at the extremes of the political spectrum, our analysis opens up a more complex picture, showing that conspiracy thinking is not merely related to extremist orientations, but to specific combinations of political attitudes.
I’m not sure I’d take this too far. The recruitment isn’t my favourite, and the narrow index of conspiracy belief makes me wonder if we’re just looking at one type of conspiratorial thinking. But interesting nonetheless.
Anthologies: Gratification, Thought Architecture, On Politics and Power, Neurotypica, Everything Is Ideology