Think you know your Brexit from your Barnier , your Trump from your Trudeau , and your Russia from your , uh , raccoon ? Well do n’t act all in high spirits and mighty just yet , as people who suppose they ’re smashing at politics might just be the most susceptible to conspiracy theory .
That ’s according to a study in theEuropean Journal of Social Psychology , picked up byPsyPost . conduct by Joseph Vitriol and Jessecae March from Lehigh University in Pennsylvania . In it , they utter to 394 people from the US before and after the 2016 presidential election .
Each was asked to rank how well they see six political policies and explain how each policy worked . And those that reckon they translate more than others were determine to be more likely to trust oddball confederacy theories , like that the US government create AIDS or JFK was not vote down by thelone triggerman Lee Harvey Oswald .
“ We find that hyperbolic confidence in one ’s discernment of politics and public policy is associated with the tendency to consider in political conspiracies , ” Vitriol tell PsyPost .
“ That is , people who overestimate how well they realize political phenomenon are more potential to believe that secret actors or clandestine grouping are complot in wide - ranging activities to regulate significant cosmos actions , events , and result . ”
This was especially unfeigned for hoi polloi who had backed the lose campaigner in an election , namely Hillary Clinton in 2016 . They found that after the election , these the great unwashed were more likely to believe conspiracies that were relate to the election .
There are some caveats to this though . The research worker mention that the 2016 US election was aparticularly polarise campaignthat featured “ conspirational rhetoric , widely disseminated false selective information , and on-going questions about the legitimacy of the electoral outcome . ” So they paint a picture that the environment may have been “ mature ” for believing in conspiracies .
And it should be noted that the sample distribution sizing for this bailiwick was comparatively minuscule , and focused alone on the 2016 election . That was unique in itself , but it ’s difficult to pull out too many conclusions from this study based on that alone .
There have been a honest few studies into confederacy theories lately . Back in May , scientists indicate that how much youhate uncertaintymay dictate how probable you are to believe things likeHitler is in reality aliveand live in Argentina . Last year , another report order conspiracy theorists justwanted to feel unique .
