some interesting material on conspiracy theories. I have mentioned Hofstadter's signature work from the early 1960s "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" that is rich in historical detail.
Here is a very recent study using epidemiological data.
specific
scientific studies of conspiracy beliefs are few and far between. And so we began by seeing what we could discover from general epidemiological surveys, mining their findings in search of associations between particular social and psychological factors and a belief in conspiracy theories. With Richard Bentall of the University of Liverpool we turned to the rich dataset of one of the largest surveys of psychological health ever carried out: the
US National Comorbidity Survey-Replication. The NCS-R is a few years old now: it was carried out in 2001-03, predating the current skeptical turn. But it was large, nationally representative, and scientifically robust.
The results of our research are published today.
The NCS-R covers a lot of ground, but one of the statements participants were asked to consider was this: “I’m convinced there’s a conspiracy behind many things in the world.” More than a quarter of those who responded to the item felt that it was true – a statistic that provides food for thought in itself. And that was fifteen years ago.
These people had several things in common. They were, for example, more likely to be male and unmarried. But what really struck us were the above-average levels of social disadvantage. Here was a group with lower levels of education and income. They were more likely to be from an ethnic minority. They were more likely to carry a weapon.
Religious attendance may help mitigate some of the effects of disadvantage; this group was
far less likely to go to services regularly.
It wasn’t just demographic characteristics that the conspiracy theorists shared. They tended to report lower levels of physical and psychological wellbeing; and to see themselves as socially inferior, both in comparison to their local community and to the nation as a whole. They were more likely to have seriously considered suicide. Their social networks were weaker (they often felt, for example, that they couldn’t rely on friends and family in times of trouble) and they found it harder to maintain secure relationships.
Childhood relationships with parents had frequently been challenging. Often these individuals hadn’t lived with both biological parents; they’d spent extended periods away from home; or had experienced violence at the hands of their parents.
Finally, the conspiracy theorists were more likely to meet the
criteria for all types of psychological disorder, including anxiety, depression, ADHD, and alcohol and drug problems.
What we see then is a clear association between a belief in conspiracy theories and a wide range of negative life circumstances and personal distress. So far an association is all it is. Do these types of problems make the people affected especially susceptible to conspiracy theories or is it the other way around? That research hasn’t been done. But our view is that the low self-esteem, smaller social networks, and marginalisation we see in so many of the US sample may play a key role at an early age, providing fertile ground for a distrust of authority: feeling that society has rejected them, they learn to reject the beliefs that society endorses.
