Resolving the Puzzle of Conspiracy Worldview and Political Activism: Belief in Secret Plots Decreases Normative but Increases Nonnormative Political Engagement

By R. Imhoff, L. Dieterle, P. Lamberty. 2021

195 citations recorded by the source corpus.

It is a hitherto open and debated question whether the belief in conspiracies increases or attenuates the willingness to engage in political action. In the present article, we tested the notion, whether (a) the relation between belief in conspiracies and general political engagement is curvilinear (inverted U-shaped) and (b) there may be opposing relations to normative versus nonnormative forms of political engagement. Two preregistered experiments (N = 194, N = 402) support both propositions and show that the hypothetical adoption of a worldview that sees the world as governed by secret plots attenuates reported intentions to participate in normative, legal forms of political participation but increases reported intentions to employ nonnormative, illegal means of political articulation. These results provide first evidence for the notion that political extremism and violence might seem an almost logical conclusion when seeing the world as governed by conspiracies.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6bda58b9bf6e3fb98d5617e87555ac2ce53b6afa

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. P. Lamberty
2. R. Imhoff
3. Paul Gill
4. Bettina Rottweiler

In Sociology and Political Science

1. P. Lamberty
2. R. Imhoff
3. Paul Gill
4. Bettina Rottweiler
5. Karen M. Douglas
6. Robbie M. Sutton
7. J. Pierre

Citations in the corpus

• Conspiracy Beliefs and Violent Extremist Intentions: The Contingent Effects of Self-efficacy, Self-control and Law-related Morality (2020, background): “More specifically, while conspiracy beliefs have been associated with stronger feelings of powerlessness, less political efficacy and less willingness to change the status quo with conventional and unconventional political action,(22) they have also been linked to higher intentions to engage in nonn”
• A Bioweapon or a Hoax? The Link Between Distinct Conspiracy Beliefs About the Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Outbreak and Pandemic Behavior (2020, background): “…also make it more plausible to engage in illegal, nonnormative forms of action to reach one’s goals, as people who imagined seeing the world as people high in conspiracy mentality saw it as more defensible to use force and other illegal means to pursue one’s political goals (Imhoff et al., 2020).”