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      Conspiracy thinking and the long historical shadow of Romanticism on authoritarian politics

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          Abstract

          Background

          Similar effect sizes have been reported for the effects of conspiracy, pseudoscientific, and paranormal beliefs on authoritarian attitudes, which points to a conceptual problem at the heart of the conspiracy literature, namely lack of clarity as to what uniquely defines conspiracy beliefs and whether those unique elements contribute distinctly to authoritarian ideologies. To our knowledge, this is the first study to test empirically the predictive power of variance unique to each construct against covariance shared among these constructs when predicting authoritarian and anti-democratic attitudes.

          Methods

          Online survey was administered to 314 participants in 2021 that included a battery of demographic and psychological measures. Hierarchical factor models were used to isolate unique variance from shared covariance among responses to items representing conspiracy, paranormal and pseudoscientific beliefs. Structural equation models were used to test their unique and shared effects on authoritarian and anti-democratic attitudes.

          Results

          We found that our combined measurement model of paranormal thinking, conspiracism, and pseudoscience exhibited exceptional model fit, and that each construct was strongly predictive of both SDO and RWA ( r = 0.73–0.86). Once the shared covariance was partitioned into a higher order factor, the residual uniqueness in each first order factors was either negatively related or unrelated to authoritarian and anti-democratic attitudes. Moreover, the higher order factor explained the gross majority of variance in conspiracy ( R 2 = 0.81) paranormal ( R 2 = 0.81) and pseudoscientific ( R 2 = 0.95) beliefs and was a far stronger predictor ( β = 0.85, p < 0.01) of anti-democratic attitudes than political partisanship ( β = 0.17, p < 0.01). Strong partisan identifiers of both parties showed much higher romanticism scores than party moderates.

          Conclusion and limitations

          When predicting authoritarian and anti-democratic attitudes, we found no empirically unique contributions of conspiracy beliefs. Instead, we found that a shared factor, representing a ‘romantic’ mindset was the main predictor of authoritarian and anti-democratic attitudes. This finding potentially explains failures of interventions in stopping the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theory researchers should refocus on the shared features that conspiracy thinking has with other unwarranted epistemic beliefs to better understand how to halt the spread of misinformation, conspiracy thinking, anti-science attitudes, and even global authoritarianism.

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          Most cited references71

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          Cutoff criteria for fit indexes in covariance structure analysis: Conventional criteria versus new alternatives

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            lavaan: AnRPackage for Structural Equation Modeling

            Yves Rosseel (2012)
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              Welcome to the Tidyverse

              Hadley Wickham, Mara Averick, Jennifer Bryan … (2019)
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Journal ID (nlm-ta): Front Psychol
                Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Front Psychol
                Journal ID (publisher-id): Front. Psychol.
                Title: Frontiers in Psychology
                Publisher: Frontiers Media S.A.
                ISSN (Electronic): 1664-1078
                Publication date (Electronic): 03 October 2023
                Publication date Collection: 2023
                Volume: 14
                Electronic Location Identifier: 1185699
                Affiliations
                [1] 1Department of Political Science, Stetson University , DeLand, FL, United States
                [2] 2Department of Psychology, Stetson University , DeLand, FL, United States
                [3] 3Department of History, Stetson University , DeLand, FL, United States
                [4] 4Department of Philosophy, Stetson University , DeLand, FL, United States
                Author notes

                Edited by: Mark Hallahan, College of the Holy Cross, United States

                Reviewed by: Marius Hans Raab, University of Bamberg, Germany; Pier Luigi Sacco, University of Studies G. d’Annunzio Chieti and Pescara, Italy

                *Correspondence: Steven M. Smallpage, ssmallpa@ 123456stetson.edu
                Article
                DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1185699
                PMC ID: 10579923
                PubMed ID: 37854138
                SO-VID: aba1c534-bb7e-48ab-8980-021a44162735
                Copyright © Copyright © 2023 Smallpage, Askew, Kurlander and Rust.
                License:

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

                History
                Date received : 13 March 2023
                Date accepted : 22 August 2023
                Page count
                Figures: 6, Tables: 2, Equations: 0, References: 71, Pages: 14, Words: 10145
                Categories
                Subject: Psychology
                Subject: Original Research
                Custom metadata
                section-at-acceptance Personality and Social Psychology

                ScienceOpen disciplines: Clinical Psychology & Psychiatry
                Keywords: romanticism,conspiracy thinking,paranormal belief,pseudoscience,authoritarianism,social dominance,structural equation (sem)
                Data availability:
                ScienceOpen disciplines: Clinical Psychology & Psychiatry
                Keywords: romanticism, conspiracy thinking, paranormal belief, pseudoscience, authoritarianism, social dominance, structural equation (sem)

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