Following the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, conspiracy theories about the attack quickly emerged on social media, some of which spread widely.
In the wake of the COVID pandemic, it seems that conspiracy theories have become increasingly prevalent. However, there is “little” evidence to support concerns that there has been an increase, according to research published in 2022 by the National Institutes of Health in the US – partly due to a lack of long-term data. But that doesn’t mean that in the age of social media, those conspiracy theories aren’t being amplified more than before.
In the UK, a 2023 poll found that one in four people believed COVID was probably or definitely a hoax, and a third of Britons believed the cost of living crisis was a government plot to control the population.
How then does it happen that seemingly rational people suddenly believe in bizarre and nonsensical ideas?
What motivates people to believe?
Professor Sander Van Linden, an expert on conspiracy theories and disinformation at the University of Cambridge, says there are three main psychological motivations that drive people to engage in conspiracy theories.
“The first is the need to have answers in a world of chaos, to be in the know, to feel special and to differentiate yourself from the rest,” he says.
But in a world where like-minded people can connect with each other instantly online, the social aspect of conspiracy theories is becoming increasingly important, he says.
“Conspiracy theories offer people an opportunity to connect with like-minded people,” he adds. “Conspiracy theorists often feel dispossessed and marginalized from the mainstream, so connecting online gives them a sense of purpose, belonging and agency. It helps restore a sense of control when the world feels out of control.”
The final psychological motivation is that it’s simply easier to believe conspiracy theories than to face reality. “People are worried about an uncertain future,” he says. “It’s much easier to believe that climate change or COVID-19 or a mass shooting is a hoax than it is to accept the reality and all the negative societal consequences of that.”
What kind of people believe them?
According to research published in 2023 by the American Psychological Association, people may be prone to believing in conspiracy theories due to a combination of personality traits and motivations.
Examples of this include relying strongly on their intuition, feeling hostile and superior to others, and perceiving threats in their environment.
Lead author Shauna Bowes says they are “probably not all simple, mentally ill people – an image routinely portrayed in popular culture”, adding: “Instead, many turn to conspiracy theories to meet their deficient motivational needs and to understand their distress and limitations.”
According to Professor Van Linden, the classic profiles are usually those of people who:
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more paranoid
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more distrustful of official institutions and traditional media
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politically more extreme
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more narcissistic
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likely to spend more time getting news through social media
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likely to score lower on tests of analytical or scientific thinking
Previous research has also shown that conspiracy theorists are more likely to think that randomly moving shapes are the result of conscious control – and that nonsensical claims are profound.
Bowes argued in his study that future research should be conducted with the understanding that conspiracy thinking is complex and that there are important and diverse variables that need to be examined in the relationships between conspiracy thinking, motivation, and personality in order to understand the general psychology behind conspiracy thinking.
How can conspiracy theories be stopped?
Professor Van Linden, author of ‘Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation & How to Build Immunity’, advocates ‘prebunking’ conspiracy theories – or the building blocks of conspiracy theories – as soon as they appear online, by debunking the ideas behind them.
He argues that encouraging people to think about these theories can provide a form of “psychological immunity” against future theories, because the building blocks of different conspiracy theories are often largely the same.
“It turns out that most conspiracy theories contain predictable ‘signatures’ that we can detect with a simple tool; CONSPIRACY (C for ‘incoherence’, O for ‘prevailing suspicion’, N for ‘nefarious intent’, S for ‘something must be wrong’, P for ‘persecuted victim’, I for ‘immunity to evidence’ and RE for ‘reinterpretation of arbitrariness’),” he says.
“The key point is that the storyline is always the same, regardless of the actual evidence.”
Professor Van Linden says conspiracy theorists “question the accepted explanation because they feel that someone is secretly plotting something behind the scenes to carry out a dark plan”.
This is usually done by reinterpreting random events and placing them in a causal relationship, ignoring inconsistencies and ignoring any evidence to the contrary.
“For example, the idea that the murder was staged by Trump himself. That would be nonsense, since they missed his brain by a hair.”
Professor Van Linden hopes that by ‘prebunking’ conspiracy theories, people will develop a new way of thinking that will make them immune to such ideas.
He says: “In a sense, the remedy we are trying to find with prebunking is a sense of Active Open-Leaving Thinking (AOT) – this is a mindset where we keep an open mind, allow for uncertainty and multiple possibilities, follow the evidence, update our beliefs in light of new evidence, and always consider non-conspiracy theories.
“You help people learn to recognize the characteristics of made-up conspiracy theories, which should generally raise some skepticism in people.”