STUDY: MID-LIFE CONSPIRACY THEORISTS ARE INDEED LONELY WEIRDOS (NOOR AL-SIBAI, 5/01/24, Futurism)
It’s a commonly-held assumption that most people who believe in conspiracy theories are loners — and new research backs it up. […]With a 2022 meta-analysis strongly associating social alienation with conspiratorial beliefs, the Oslo researchers decided to look into nearly three decades of records on more than 2200 Norwegians, using healthcare and psychological data to determine what factors might help explain mid-life conspiracism. What they found, as they explain in their paper, was fascinating:
Conspiracist worldviews were particularly appealing to participants who were relatively lonely as adolescents and experienced increasing loneliness through their lives. One possible explanation for this pattern, albeit tentative and requiring further research, is that the contrasting of one’s own increasing loneliness relative to peers might be potent in fostering feelings of social isolation motivating our participants to turn to conspiracy theorizing to protect their ego, or to seek social connection among like-minded conspiracist groups.