by orbat

Conspiracy theories have permeated the history of humanity from our earliest hunter-gatherer days through to modern times. We are less likely than our ancestors to be killed by enemies, and are relatively well-protected by the legal system, to name just a few differences. However, the fact that our environment has changed doesn’t mean that our evolved, ancestral brain has changed along with it. This is the basic idea of an evolutionary mismatch: over the past 12,000 years, the way in which human beings live has changed quickly and dramatically. But on an evolutionary scale, 12,000 years is just a fraction of time, and our inborn predispositions have not changed by much. Our brains are adapted to a stone-age environment but we live in modern times.

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Of interest here is that people not only differ in conspiracy beliefs but also in how prone they are to interpret ambiguous social signals as evidence of conflict with other groups. For instance, collective narcissism – an unrealistic belief in the greatness of one’s own group – is a good predictor of aggression towards other groups. Likewise, people differ in how much they value authority, order and tradition, a trait known as authoritarianism, which is closely coupled with prejudice about different groups. Research indicates that those with high levels of collective narcissism, or authoritarianism, are also likely to believe conspiracy theories. Put differently, personality traits that predispose people to prejudice, discrimination and hostility towards other groups go hand in hand with a tendency to believe conspiracy theories. Some people see hostility and conflict with other groups where others see none. Perceiving conflict with other groups drives conspiracy beliefs.

Assuming that lower cognitive ability does predict right-wing authoritarianism (see the linked comment), I think it's interesting that authoritarianism then seems to predict a tendency to believe in conspiracy theories.

Does this mean that conspiracy theories are an adaptation mechanism that compensates for lower cognitive ability, if – at their heart – conspiracy theories are a survival mechanism based on the fact that it's usually less costly for your "threat detection" to give false positives than false negatives? If you don't have the processing power to suss out what the hell's going on, then being suspicious might save your ass one day when you can't really work out eg. someone's intentions.