Conspiracy Theories, Schizotypy, & Dark Triad Traits | What is a Conspiracist?

welcome to my scientifically informed insider look at mental health topics if you find this video to be interesting or helpful please like it and subscribe to my channel hello this is dr. grande today's question asks so I can take a look at conspiracy theories and talk about their relationship to the dark triad traits and schizo Tippie now we talk about conspiracy theories and the belief in conspiracy theories we know that there's no single agreed upon definition for a conspiracy theory and this really makes the phenomenon somewhat difficult to study so looking at two popular definitions

we can kind of see the problem here already one is for a conspiracy theory the unnecessary assumption of conspiracy when other explanations are more probable second definition and unverified and relatively implausible allegation of conspiracy claiming that the events are the result of a secret plot carried out by a preternaturally sinister and powerful group of people right so preternaturally means outside of the natural it's different than supernatural so supernatural means an act of God and preternatural means just outside of nature so you could have like evil forces that would be preternatural so either way we see

really the problem here with defining conspiracy theories as I mentioned if you look at these two definitions you see completely different aspects of this construct right so if you look at the first definition that could be almost anybody an unnecessary assumption of conspiracy when other explanations are more probable a lot of people do that with the second definition that's a much smaller group of people right so these people believe in sinister individuals who are out there doing something outside of the natural world that is going to cause damage now of those two definitions I do

like the second one a little bit better I think it taps into the construct of what we mean by a conspiracy theory a little better and using a definition like that or similar to that we see that over 50% of Americans believe in at least one conspiracy theory so conspiracy theories are fairly now there are a lot of different conceptualizations about what predicts the belief in a conspiracy theory one model is that there are three main factors that predict the belief there's the existential threat and this really resonates what we see in conspiracy theory thinking

conspiracy theories are really never innocent right they're always some sort of massive threat to humanity or to a lot of people involved in them for example we don't see theories about government officials plotting to make ice cream more available right it's always something again kind of dangerous the next factor is sense making processes so people who believe in conspiracy theories sometimes called conspiracists they believe that their explanation is the most logical they believe they've applied a logical reasonable process and the conclusion that they have come to is in alignment with what other reasonable people should

have come to right so people are being fooled but they're not being fooled so they believe they're logical and other people are trying to be logical but again they don't know the truth and the third factor is an antagonistic out-group again so this would be the so-called bad guys - sinister people that are conspiring with each other now just because somebody believes in a conspiracy doesn't make them a conspiracy theorist right so generally for somebody be considered a conspiracist they have to believe in several conspiracy theories they have to actively endorse the conspiracy theories and

at least one of the theories would often anyway involve something bizarre or implausible so this really gets into a comparison with in conspiracists so kind of regular and die hard I guess and comparing these two groups what we call conventional lists so conventional lists are essentially the opposite of a conspiracist conventionalist look at situations and say there is a reasonable explanation that does not involve a conspiracy although technically somebody could be a conventional list and believe that some conspiracy still occur we have those different definitions out there for conspiracy theory so it can get a

little bit tricky so conspiracism is not associated with a lack of knowledge about politics this is something we hear a lot like Oh conspiracy theorist must not understand politics actually research shows that they are just as informed about political facts as conventionalist in online forms we see that conspiracists are sometimes painted as more hostile and using more aggressive language interestingly conventionalist tend to be more hostile and online forms at least people don't always fit clearly into one category or another this is another problem looking at the online forms we see that some conspiracist will argue

for a conspiracy the argue in favor of a conspiracy theory but that same individual will argue against other conspiracy theories so in a sense they're only a conspiracist looking at certain theories that are conventionalist looking at other theories so again categorization and studying these phenomena this becomes difficult so with all this in mind what really qualifies somebody to be a conspiracist I think it really comes down to a few different things but one key part would be passive versus active endorsement I talked about that but there is no set rule so I'll just offer my

opinion here I'm going to provide some examples here of beliefs that are and are not generally related to being an official or die hard I guess conspiracy theorists so first looking at some beliefs that I think are not associated really with being a true conspiracy theorist so somebody believes in high-level corruption I don't think this is really related to conspiracy theories unfortunately this type of corruption is common so it doesn't really in my opinion qualify as a conspiracy theory if somebody believes in one conspiracy theory and that person has some sort of connection to that

theory that tends to move I think away from being a conspiracy theorist for example if somebody owns a car and it breaks down when they are driving to a polling place to cast their vote an election they might start to believe that the automotive manufacturers are in conspiracy against the politician that they are going to vote for right if it's isolated to something that they're connected to and something happened to them directly that could just be a logical error and not necessarily somebody who really truly believes in a number of conspiracy theories I think if

somebody believes in a conspiracy theory that is technically possible and not bizarre in nature that could mean they're not really a serious conspiracy theorist for example people who believe that the government is spying on citizens we know this has actually happened so in some cases yes it's a conspiracy theory but in other cases it's true believing in a political conspiracy theory only so somebody believes that their political party lost an election because of a conspiracy by the other party this is actually remarkably common we see this after many many elections so I don't think somebody

has to be a true conspiracy theorist to believe this now also looking at like non specificity so there's this item from an instrument that's used to measure belief in conspiracy theories and the item says much of what happens in the world today is decided by a small and secretive group of individuals well that's not really specific and we see that over 50% of people endorse this statement so I don't really associate this again with being kind of a die-hard conspiracist and the last one here would be a weak endorsement of or a weak attitude toward

a conspiracy theory so essentially not believing it all the way so if somebody says that they believe it's more likely than not that there was no moon landing that's not really committing to the belief so now moving to the side of the official or diehard conspiracy theorist what do they believe typically well we see a few different things here they tend to believe conspiracy theories that were made up by researchers right we see papers that talk about this where researchers just completely made up a conspiracy theory no one believed this conspiracy theory it wasn't an

official one it wasn't out there anyway and people who tended to believe how their conspiracy theories believed in it so that's waiting more toward the serious side we see believing in conspiracy theories that are mutually contradict right I've seen this many times for example somebody who believes that lizard people are in control of the government and Hollywood but there's also a secret society who's in control of the government in Hollywood well you can't have the lizards and the humans both in control right somebody's got to be in control somebody has to be in charge so

those are really contradictory it's either the lizards or the humans right and again I've seen many people actually who believe in both and when kind of confronted about the inconsistency typically they can't offer really much of an explanation there so they're kind of missing the fact that they're contradictory now another one here would be believing in conspiracy theories that have bizarre content so the government is hiding evidence that there are aliens walking around the planet or the earth is flat or something that has kind of a magical thinking bizarre element and I'll talk about that

in a moment when I get to schizo Tippi so I think that's more on the diehard side and the last one list here would be the belief did not originate from a rational evaluation of evidence related specifically to conspiracy theories in which the person believes rather we see a general tendency to believe in conspiracy theories now this concept is called conspiracy ideation and sometimes it's called conspiratorial thinking it's often using this element that conspiracy theories are studied right people who kind of invest in this particular thinking they tend to believe in several conspiracy theories not

really rationally evaluating evidence so many people think of conspiracy theories as relatively harmless and some appear to be like if somebody believes that there was no moon landing that's not necessarily obviously destructive others however are fairly destructive for example declining vaccination rates have been attributed to vaccination related conspiracy beliefs also belief in conspiracy theories can lead to social and political disengagement so it might be bad for society for a lot of people to believe in conspiracy theories but it's also bad for the individual who believes in the conspiracy theories now think conspiracy theories is related

to paranoia low trust receptivity to unusual beliefs schizo Tippie belief in the paranormal although this relationship is actually fairly weak high openness to experience and low agreeableness and these have been contested as well now looking specifically at low agreeableness this leads us to the idea of the dark triad traits because low agreeableness is common to all three of those traits narcissism psychopathy and Machiavellianism so this kind of leads me specifically to answering the question about conspiracy theorist and schizotypy and dark triad traits now I use several articles to help make this video and one specific

article really looked at the question of schizotypy and the dark triad traits I'll put the references for all the articles in the description for this video but in this one article again specifically looking at this topic we see they performed a regression using AI beliefs and magical thinking from schizotypy and also narcissism both grandiose and vulnerable psychopathy both primary and secondary and machiavellianism so all these variables were loaded in the regression as predictor variables and the outcome variable was conspiracy theory beliefs so they wanted to see kind of what the contribution was of all these

variables to having conspiracy theory beliefs what was the variance that each of these predictor variables explained in conspiracy theory beliefs what we see here is that 55% of the variance of conspiracy theory beliefs were explained by odd thinking magical beliefs Machiavellianism and primary psychopathy so these are really interesting findings that's quite a bit of variance and it's interesting in terms of what explained the variance but it's also interesting in terms of what didn't explain a statistically significant amount of variance so kind of breaking this down looking at these starting with odd thinking and magical beliefs

we see this as one of the characteristics of schizotypy and of schizotypal personality which is a cluster a person is order in the dsm now schizotypy is considered to be kind of on a continuum with schizophrenia so it goes from paranoid personality traits to schizoid personality traits this gets a tipple personality traits and then moves to schizophrenia that's kind of how we think of it so it kind of makes sense that odd thinking and magical beliefs would have kind of this delusional component to them and we know that these beliefs can become morbid with delusional

thinking now we also see specifically with this item that conspiracy theories may offer a sense of control over the unexplained right so if somebody has odd thinking they have magical beliefs they want to know they have some control over that which they really can't explain and conspiracy theories kind of fill that gap they kind of satisfy that need now moving to machiavellianism when I was reading this finding this one really didn't make a lot of sense to me right so there's a cynical component with Machiavellianism because some a cynical they might believe that other people

would be involved in a conspiracy because they might do the same thing if they had a chance to be they might think of themselves as being one of those government officials who's capable of conducting this type of conspiracy so I guess cynical kind of connects a little bit in terms of these strategic and opportunistic components of Machiavellianism I don't really see how there's much to gain by believing in a conspiracy theory so these don't seem to line up for me anyway now people who are Machiavellian istic tend to view people as foolish and possibly as

being inferior so it's really easy for them to picture other people as being the victims of a sophisticated government plot for example so I guess this component is fairly consistent with this finding and we see that people who are Machiavelli mystic are prone to manipulate others and because of this Tennessee they may be worried about being manipulated themselves so by believing in a conspiracy theory they're kind of making a preemptive strike right they're reaching out and distrusting people and maybe even trying to manipulate people rather than being the victim of that behavior now we move

to primary psychopathy this one I don't really see I mean I know the research findings had it connected but I don't really see the connection here maybe it has something to do with the overlap between primary psychopathy and Cavalia nism so again seeing people as easy to manipulate so it makes sense the people in the government would be manipulating others that's the only thing I can really see that connects it's hard for me to really see how people who are psychopathic would be too interested in conspiracy theories so again I didn't really connect with this

one now in terms of the characteristics that aren't related right again I think these are just as interesting secondary psychopathy was not related at all so people don't believe in conspiracy theories because of something like impulsivity now in terms of narcissism we see no relationship here between grandiose or vulnerable now prior research has shown that grandiose narcissism was related but again this study says it's not and vulnerable narcissism I'm not aware of any studies that connect that to conspiracy theory beliefs so what I find interesting about this with the secondary psychopathy and both types of

narcissism is this really means that there's no relationship between conspiracy theorist and cluster B personality pathology we don't see anything connecting to antisocial personality disorder that would be the secondary psychopathy nothing connected to narcissistic personality disorder that would be the grandiose narcissism nothing connected to borderline personality that would have some connection over to vulnerable narcissism and of course we don't see anything with histrionic history odd person is or isn't really studied that much so I'd be surprised if anybody even tried to make the connection in research to even study it in the first place now

interestingly because of that lack of a relationship with vulnerable narcissism that means that conspiracy theories are probably not connected to cluster C personality pathology either so avoidant dependent and obsessive-compulsive personality disorders so we look at conspiracy theorists we're really looking at potentially cluster a personality pathology schizo Tippie but nothing from cluster B and clusters C usually again this research is looking at tendencies so I know whenever I talk about topics like conspiracy theories there'll be a variety of opinions please put any opinions and thoughts in the comment section they always generate a really interesting dialogue

as always I hope you found this description of conspiracy theories skits at Tippie and the dark triad traits to be interesting thanks for watching