Conspiratorial thinking during COVID-19: The roles of paranoia, delusion-proneness, and intolerance of uncertainty
Open accessAbstract
The COVID-19 global pandemic has left many feeling a sense of profound uncertainty about their world, safety, and livelihood. Information that can help make sense of this uncertainty is offered by both official health-organizations as well as sources espousing misinformation and conspiracy theories. Individuals high in intolerance of uncertainty (IU) may be particularly impacted by the impoverished epistemic environment and may thus be more drawn to conspiratorial thinking (CT). In the present study we show that endorsement of COVID-19-specific conspiracy theories is associated with higher levels of intolerance of uncertainty as well as anxiety, delusion-proneness, and paranoid ideation. Furthermore, delusion-proneness and paranoia explained the relationship between IU and CT, and emerged as independent partial predictors of CT even when controlling for other facets of schizotypy. In contrast, anxiety did not explain the relationship between IU and CT, suggesting a stronger role of cognitive traits as opposed to affective factors. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of individual differences in IU, delusion proneness and paranoia in the development of CT in the context of the acute uncertainty of a global crisis, in which CT is more prevalent and salient. Informational intervention designs may benefit from leveraging the body of work demonstrating the efficacy of targeting IU to incite meaningful changes in thinking.
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Lack of trust in the government is related to higher acceptance of conspiracy theories, which is related to higher fear/anxiety related to COVID-19.
“Some recent studies have already implicated such a possibility by demonstrating that a lack of trust in the government is related to a higher acceptance of conspiracy theories (Bruder and Kunert, 2020) that is by itself related to the higher fear/anxiety related to COVID-19 (Alper et al., 2020; Larsen et al., 2020).”
From Intolerance of Uncertainty and Tendency to Worry as Mediators Between Trust in Institutions and Social Support and Fear of Coronavirus and Consequences of the Pandemic (2021) · cites this paper as Larsen et al., 2020
Larsen et al. is cited for the link between conspiracy-theory acceptance and higher COVID-19 fear or anxiety, not for the government-trust link. In Study 2 Results (page unavailable), the paper reports no significant association between COVID-19 conspiratorial thinking and anxiety; it measured state anxiety rather than COVID-19-specific fear. The Study 2 Discussion also says anxiety did not explain the relationship between intolerance of uncertainty and conspiratorial thinking. (LLM, conf=0.88)
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- Authors
- Larsen, E. M., Donaldson, K. R., Liew, M., & Mohanty, A.
- Affiliations
- Stony Brook University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Larsen, Emmett M.
- Venue
- Frontiers in Psychiatry
- Publisher
- Center for Open Science
- Published
- 2020-06-17
- Volume
- 12
- Pages
- 698147-698147
- ISSN
- 1664-0640 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC8416269
- OpenAlex
- W3162021195
- Cited by
- 71
- References
- 65
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 7 · 2024: 15 · 2023: 15 · 2022: 14 · 2021: 15 · 2020: 3
- FWCI
- 20.47
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- Frontiers in Psychiatry (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › COVID-19 and Mental Health
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Paranormal Experiences and Beliefs
- Keywords
- conspiracy beliefs, COVID-19 pandemic, intolerance of uncertainty, paranoia, delusion proneness, schizotypy, uncertainty, misinformation, anxiety, information interventions
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
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