UFO’s, planned assassinations, stage moon landings? Sound incredulous? Not to millions of people who devote their lives to conspiracy theories. And now researchers are claiming that if you support a conspiracy theory, it’s probably because you wish you lived one…..
Here’s what new research tells us about conspiracy theorists: they fall for outlandish schemes because they’d like to participate in one themselves.
Miller-McCune reports on a British Journal of Social Psychology study that linked the conspiratorially-minded with a propensity toward Machiavellianism, the tendency to use deceit for personal gain. The study’s authors explained their findings, via the research magazine, this way:
These studies suggest that people who have more lax personal morality may endorse conspiracy theories to a greater extent because they are, on average, more willing to participate in the conspiracies themselves.
In one revealing example, the study found that “highly Machiavellian individuals were seemingly more likely to believe that government agents staged the 9/11 attacks because they were more likely to perceive that they would do so themselves, if [they found themselves] in the government’s position.”