Who's More Prone to Conspiracy Theories, Left or Right?
The answer may surprise you - but only if you're a social scientist
Liberals and conservatives are both prone to conspiracy theories; they just prefer different ones. That, at any rate, is the conclusion of a fascinating recent paper by Adam Enders and colleagues, looking at the relationship between conspiracy theories and political orientation.
The researchers set out to test the hypothesis, popular in the social sciences, that conservatives are uniquely prone to conspiracy theories. (It’s probably worth noting that most social scientists are on the left.)
Their main findings are shown in the graph below. Scores less than 0 indicate that the conspiracy theory is more common among liberals/leftists; scores above 0 indicate that it’s more common among conservatives. Note that the graph shows the size of the left-right difference, not the popularity of the view.
As Enders and colleagues concluded, “In no instance do we observe systematic evidence of a political asymmetry.” Here’s the abstract of their paper:
A sizable literature tracing back to Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style (1964) argues that Republicans and conservatives are more likely to believe conspiracy theories than Democrats and liberals. However, the evidence for this proposition is mixed. Since conspiracy theory beliefs are associated with dangerous orientations and behaviors, it is imperative that social scientists better understand the connection between conspiracy theories and political orientations. Employing 20 surveys of Americans from 2012 to 2021 (total n = 37,776), as well as surveys of 20 additional countries spanning six continents (total n = 26,416), we undertake an expansive investigation of the asymmetry thesis. First, we examine the relationship between beliefs in 52 conspiracy theories and both partisanship and ideology in the U.S.; this analysis is buttressed by an examination of beliefs in 11 conspiracy theories across 20 more countries. In our second test, we hold constant the content of the conspiracy theories investigated—manipulating only the partisanship of the theorized villains—to decipher whether those on the left or right are more likely to accuse political out-groups of conspiring. Finally, we inspect correlations between political orientations and the general predisposition to believe in conspiracy theories over the span of a decade. In no instance do we observe systematic evidence of a political asymmetry. Instead, the strength and direction of the relationship between political orientations and conspiricism is dependent on the characteristics of the specific conspiracy beliefs employed by researchers and the socio-political context in which those ideas are considered.
You can access a free copy of the paper here.
For more on the psychology of conspiracy theories, see my earlier post looking at predicators of conspiratorial thinking:
