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Profiling a Conspiracy Theorist: Why Some People Believe

By Joshua Hart, Union College | September 26, 2018 08:31am ET

Here's a theory: President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. Here's another: Climate change is a hoax. Here's one more: The "deep state" spied on Donald Trump's campaign, and is now trying to destroy his presidency.

Who believes this stuff? Conspiracy theories have been cooked up for ages, but for the first time in history, we have a president who has regularly endorsed them. Assuming that President Donald Trump's preoccupation is genuine, he shares it with many fellow Americans. What explains it?

I'm a psychologist who studies, among other things, people's worldviews and belief systems. I wanted to figure out why some people gobble up conspiratorial explanations, while others dismiss them as the raving of lunatics.

Consistency in views

By and large, people gravitate toward conspiracy theories that seem to affirm or validate their political views. Republicans are vastly more likely than Democrats to believe the Obama "birther" theory or that climate change is a hoax. Democrats are more likely to believe that Trump's campaign "colluded" with the Russians.

But some people are habitual conspiracists who entertain a variety of generic conspiracy theories.

For example, they believe that world politics are controlled by a cabal instead of governments, or that scientists systematically deceive the public. This indicates that personality or other individual differences might be at play.

In fact, some people seem to be downright devoted to conspiracy theories. When conspiracy maven Alex Jones' content was recently banned from several social media websites, the popularity of his Infowars news app skyrocketed.

Scientific research examining the nature of the "conspiratorial disposition" is abundant, but scattershot. So in a pair of new studies, and with help from my student Molly Graether, I tried to build on previous research to piece together a more comprehensive profile of the typical conspiracy theory believer, and for that matter, the typical non-believer.

Common traits

We asked more than 1,200 American adults to provide extensive information about themselves and whether they agreed with generic conspiratorial statements. We tried to measure as many personal factors as possible that had been previously linked to conspiracy belief. Looking at many traits simultaneously would allow us to determine, all else being equal, which ones were most important.

Consistent with previous research, we found that one major predictor of conspiracy belief was "schizotypy." That's a constellation of traits that include a tendency to be relatively untrusting, ideologically eccentric and prone to having unusual perceptual experiences (e.g., sensing stimuli that are not actually present). The trait borrows its name from schizophrenia, but it does not imply a clinical diagnosis.

Schizotypy is the strongest predictor of conspiracy belief. In addition to experiencing the world in unusual ways, we found that people higher in schizotypy have an elevated need to feel unique, which has previously been linked with conspiracism.

Why? Probably because believing in non-mainstream ideas allows people to stand out from their peers, but at the same time take refuge in a community of like-minded believers.

In our studies, conspiracy believers were also disproportionately concerned that the world is a dangerous place. For example, they were more likely to agree that "all the signs" are pointing to imminent chaos.

Finally, conspiracists had distinct cognitive tendencies: They were more likely than nonbelievers to judge nonsensical statements as profound – for example, "wholeness quiets infinite phenomena" – a tendency cheekily known as "bullshit receptivity."

They were also more likely to say that nonhuman objects – triangle shapes moving around on a computer screen – were acting intentionally, as though they were capable of having thoughts and goals they were trying to accomplish.

In other words, they inferred meaning and motive where others did not.

Is Trump a conspiracy thinker?

Although we can't know how he would score on our questionnaires, President Trump's public statements and behavior suggest that he fits the profile fairly well.

First, he does display some schizotypal characteristics. He is famously untrusting of others. Donald Trump Jr. has described how his father used to admonish him in kindergarten not to trust anyone under any circumstances.

The elder Trump is also relatively eccentric. He is a unique politician who doesn't hew consistently to party lines or political norms. He has espoused unusual ideas, including the theory that people have a limited lifetime reservoir of energy that physical exercise depletes.

President Trump also seems to see the world as a dangerous place. His campaign speeches warned about murderous rapist immigrants flooding across the border and black communities being in "the worst shape" they've ever been. His inauguration address described a hellish landscape of "American carnage."

Chaos needs comfort

The dismal nature of most conspiracy theories presents a puzzle to psychologists who study beliefs, because most belief systems – think religion – are fundamentally optimistic and uplifting. Psychologists have found that people tend to adopt such beliefs in part because they fulfill emotional goals, such as the need to feel good about oneself and the world. Conspiracy theories don't seem to fit this mold.

Then again, if you are a person who looks at the world and sees chaos and malevolence, perhaps there is comfort in the notion that there is someone to blame. If "there's something going on," then there is something that could be done about it.

Perhaps, then, even the darkest and most bizarre conspiracy theories offer a glint of hope for some people.

Take the "QAnon" theory that has recently received a flurry of media attention. This theory features a nightmare of pedophile rings and satanic cults. But some adherents have adopted a version of the theory that President Trump has it all under control.

If our research advances the understanding of why some people are more attracted to conspiracy theories than others, it is important to note that it says nothing about whether or not conspiracy theories are true.

After the Watergate scandal brought down a president for participating in a criminal conspiracy, the American public learned that seemingly outlandish speculation about the machinations of powerful actors is sometimes right on the money.

And when a conspiracy is real, people with a conspiracist mindset may be among the first to pick up on it – while others get duped. The rub is that the rest of the time, they might be duping themselves.

Joshua Hart, Associate Professor of Psychology, Union College

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Opinion: Why The Term 'Deep State' Speaks To Conspiracy Theorists

August 9, 2018·10:14 AM ET
Geoff Nunberg


The citizens of democracies have always been suspicious about concentrations of unelected power. In the late days of the Roman Republic, Cicero denounced the triumvirate who had usurped the role of the Senate as the imperium in imperio, or the government within the government. Nowadays, the alleged usurpers go by more pedestrian names: the invisible government, the hidden government, the shadow government.

Those names often reflect plausible concerns, sometimes about the lobbyists and business interests who shape regulations and policies, sometimes about the career civil servants who seem to care mostly about protecting their bureaucratic turf.

But the allegations can also tip over into the convoluted narratives of conspiracy theory, where people are covering bulletin boards with pins and string to show how everything's secretly connected to everything else.

The "deep state" story conforms to the intricate grammar of those conspiracy narratives. The term was marginal in American politics until it was picked up by Breitbart News in 2016 and quickly adopted by the president and his allies.

The president has been appending it to his tweets as a kind of mantra: "Where is the DNC Server, and why didn't the FBI take possession of it? Deep State?"

It's an elastic label — depending on the occasion, it can encompass the Justice Department, the intelligence communities, the FISA courts, the Democrats and the media. In short, it's a cabal of unelected leftist officials lodged deep in the government who are conspiring to thwart the administration's policies, discredit its supporters and ultimately even overturn Trump's election.

It's gotten to the point where some of the president's defenders are describing the Russia investigation as an attempt to launch a "soft coup." That's not a phrase we're used to hearing in American political discourse. But then there's something alien about the phrase "deep state" itself.

Until recently, it was chiefly used for developing countries like Turkey and Pakistan, where the government answers to "shadowy elites" in the military and intelligence services — and where coups and purges are routine occurrences.

Granted, not many people who talk about the "deep state" are aware of that origin. But there's a trace of those dark connotations in the very decision to talk about the "state" rather than the government. It's a marked choice of words.

In America, what usually comes to mind when you say "state" is the political units that make up the "United States," like Alabama or Wyoming. Apart from a few locutions like "church and state" or "state secrets," we don't often talk about "the state" the way other nations do — to refer to our central government or to the country as a whole.

And as William Safire noted in his Political Dictionary, when Americans do use "the state" that way, the word is freighted with totalitarian connotations. He pointed to phrases like "garrison state" and "police state." And you can add "state terrorism," "surveillance state" and above all "enemy of the state," a label that exists only in countries that make political opposition a criminal offense.

Liberal critics of Fox News take advantage of those connotations when they describe the network as "state television." The phrase brings to mind the media that serve as mouthpieces for autocratic regimes in China and Russia — not the government-run networks in New Zealand or France.

And conservatives rely on those same connotations to add a malign note to the epithets they use to denounce the overreach of government programs. Safire's Political Dictionary describes "welfare state" as an "attack phrase" that was synonymous with "creeping socialism." The American right borrowed "the nanny state" from British Conservatives during the Thatcher years, and "the regulatory state" was added a decade later.

When "the state" takes on that totalitarian color, it becomes a monolith that expands to fill every corner of society. That's the very definition of totalitarianism: As Mussolini put it, "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state."

When conservatives condemn the evils of "statism" rather than of "big government," they tend to focus on the way the state infiltrates everyday life — the double yellow lines that forbid passing on empty rural blacktops or a ban on unpasteurized cheeses.

... the specter of the 'deep state' is chilling precisely because it seems to be so capable. Hidden from view, it orchestrates complex schemes across a half-dozen agencies, buries incriminating documents, compromises inconvenient opponents with spurious allegations.


It's that suggestion of ruthless efficiency that makes "the deep state" sound more ominous than a name like "the invisible government." We think of a government as a collection of people, with all their foibles and frailties. Recall the sarcastic quip that Ronald Reagan made famous: "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'" That's what the phrase "government bureaucrats" typically brings to mind — meddlesome bunglers who think they know our interests better than we do.

Whereas the specter of the "deep state" is chilling precisely because it seems to be so capable. Hidden from view, it orchestrates complex schemes across a half-dozen agencies, buries incriminating documents, compromises inconvenient opponents with spurious allegations.

The government and the state. Those are the twin bogeys of conservative rhetoric: the hapless functionaries who can never get their act together, the conniving ideologues who can. What's not clear is where the notion of a public servant fits in.

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