The Cognitive Foundations of Conspiratorial Thinking

Belief in conspiracy theories can be highly detrimental not only for the affected individual, but also for the wellbeing of society as a whole. Despite the importance of understanding the factors that contribute to their prevalence, we currently lack an integrated characterization of which underlying cognitive factors render an individual vulnerable to such beliefs. To address this gap, we utilized a battery of six cognitive tasks targeting distinct but overlapping cognitive attributes spanning different aspects of information processing from information perception, information seeking, and the evaluation and integration of information to make decisions. We then administered this task battery to a large online cohort. When integrating across tasks using unsupervised machine-learning and multivariate statistical methods, we find evidence to suggest that conspiracy believers exhibit a relatively specific but domain general deficit in the ability to effectively integrate and utilize empirical evidence, as well as an increased tendency to misattribute the consequences of their own actions to the interference of others. These effects were found to be associated with conspiracy beliefs even after controlling for the effects of other psychiatrically relevant symptom dimensions such as schizotypy, anxiety, worry and depression. Our findings thus suggest the existence of a specific cognitive phenotype underlying susceptibility to conspiracy beliefs, which in turn could point the way toward more targeted interventions to mitigate their influence.