Abstract
It is often claimed that conspiracy theories are endorsed with the same level of intensity across the left‐right ideological spectrum. But do liberals and conservatives in the United States embrace conspiratorial thinking to an equivalent degree? There are important historical, philosophical, and scientific reasons dating back to Richard Hofstadter's bookThe Paranoid Style in American Politicsto doubt this claim. In four large studies of U.S. adults (totalN = 5049)—including national samples—we investigated the relationship between political ideology, measured in both symbolic and operational terms, and conspiratorial thinking in general. Results reveal that conservatives in the United States were not only more likely than liberals to endorse specific conspiracy theories, but they were also more likely to espouse conspiratorial worldviews in general (r = .27, 95% CI: .24, .30). Importantly, extreme conservatives were significantly more likely to engage in conspiratorial thinking than extreme liberals (Hedges'g = .77,SE = .07,p < .001). The relationship between ideology and conspiratorial thinking was mediated by a strong distrust of officialdom and paranoid ideation, both of which were higher among conservatives, consistent with Hofstadter's account of the paranoid style in American politics.
Highlights
It is often claimed that conspiracy theories are endorsed with the same level of intensity across the left-right ideological spectrum
STUDY 1 In Study 1, we examined the relationship between political ideology and conspiratorial thinking in a large, nationally representative sample of American adults
In four studies based on diverse samples and a broad constellation of measures of political ideology and conspiratorial thinking, we found that conservatives in the United States were significantly and substantially more likely than liberals to embrace conspiratorial ways of thinking
Summary
It is often claimed that conspiracy theories are endorsed with the same level of intensity across the left-right ideological spectrum. There are many troubling consequences of conspiratorial thinking, including antisocial behavior, hostility against outgroups, rejection of science, decreased trust in government, and a lack of civic engagement (Einstein & Glick, 2015; Flynn, Nyhan, & Reifler, 2017; Jolley & Douglas, 2014; Lewandowsky & Oberauer, 2016; van der Linden, 2015; Swami, 2012; Uscinski & Parent, 2014) For all of these reasons, it is important to understand the sociocognitive factors that shape public belief in conspiracy theories. Hofstadter described several ways in which “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” contributed to a wide range of right-wing movements that—following Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford (1950)—he characterized as “pseudo-conservative” because they “believe themselves to be conservatives and usually employ the rhetoric of conservatism” but “have little in common with the temperate and compromising spirit of true conservatism in the classical sense of the word” and “show signs of a serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions, and institutions” (Hofstadter, 1954/1955, p. 3)
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