Dominance desires predicting conspiracy beliefs and Trump support in the 2016 US election.

Since 2016 terms such as “post-truth” or “alternative facts” have been symbolic for the spread of evidence-absent political discourse. As decision-making absent actual facts is dangerous, it is important to determine why people believe in conspiracies such as “large scale voter fraud” (Trump, 2016a). In this study we showed that desires to dominate/fears of being dominated (i.e., dominance motive) predicted conspiracy beliefs as voters faced challenges to election-relevant cognitions (e.g., “we will win”; “we are superior”). We explained this by dominance motives giving value to challenged election cognitions which would increase individuals’ desires to alleviate this challenge (i.e., by adopting conspiracy beliefs). In line with this we found Trump voters facing defeat pre-election believed more in election conspiracies as a function of their dominance motive. This effect disappeared post-election, as by Trump’s victory such challenges were arguably attenuated. Moreover, Clinton voters’ dominance motive positively, though weakly, predicted believing in election conspiracies after the election. Exploratory analyses showed mediating effects of conspiracy belief on the relationship between dominance motives and preferring Trump over Clinton. This research complements previous findings showing personality characteristics predicting conspiracy beliefs and, by using actual conspiracy beliefs in a real-life event, add to their ecological validity.