Malevolent intentions and secret coordination. Dissecting cognitive processes in conspiracy beliefs via diffusion modeling

Abstract

There has been an increasing scholarly interest in the psychology behind conspiracy theories, the belief that events in the world are brought about by the secret coordination of others with negative intentions. Typically, people differ systematically in the degree to which they endorse a wide range of such theories, suggesting a general suspicious attitude, i.e., a conspiracy mentality. The present research investigated how conspiracy mentality is related to the interpretation of mundane and societal events as being based on secret coordination, respectively malevolent intentions. Specifically, we tapped into the cognitive architecture of such decisions via drift diffusion modeling to test three conceivable mechanisms: a-priori tendencies to assume more often secret agreements and negative intent, enhanced informational processing into the direction of these conspiracy-related outcomes, and cognitive shortcuts. In four experiments (total N = 1083), participants made fast and intuitive decisions about the existence of secret agreements or negative intentions behind numerous events, each described in one short phrase. The results indicate that conspiracy mentality is associated with a propensity to perceive secrecy and negative intent in big societal as well as small every-day events. Cognitively, conspiracy mentality refers in these intuitive decisions primarily to presuppositions and prior attitudes before considering further information, but also to motivated processing, whereas there was no evidence for decisional shortcuts. We discuss that the general suspicious attitude behind the endorsement of conspiracy theories includes a cognitive style predisposing to intuitively assume—even independent of content—more secrecy and negative intentionality.