Psychologists often assume that people who believe in specific conspiracy theories are driven by an overarching “conspiracy mentality,” a broad mindset of suspicion toward powerful groups. A large-scale analysis across 17 country samples, published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, suggests that while a general conspiracy mentality and belief in specific conspiracy theories are generally distinct, this broad mindset does not consistently sit at the center of people’s conspiracy belief systems. Instead, the relationship between the two varied across studies that used different conspiracy items and questionnaires.

In psychology and political science, researchers distinguish between two ways of looking at conspiratorial thinking. Specific conspiracy beliefs refer to the endorsement of concrete claims that major events or social conditions result from secret plots by powerful actors pursuing harmful or self-serving goals, such as allegations that a government orchestrated a terrorist attack or that health agencies are hiding lethal vaccine side effects. Conspiracy mentality, by contrast, is a generalized predisposition or worldview in which a person suspects that secret plots and deceptive authorities manipulate world events in general, without referencing any particular event or group.

This distinction grew out of one of the most consistent findings in conspiracy research: people rarely believe in just one conspiracy theory in isolation. Someone who accepts one conspiracy claim is much more likely to endorse others, even when the stories are unrelated or contradictory. For example, a 2012 study of British college students found that the more people believed Princess Diana faked her own death, the more they believed she was murdered. In a follow-up about Osama bin Laden, the link between contradictory claims was largely accounted for by a broader belief that authorities were engaged in a cover-up.

To explain why diverse conspiracy beliefs cluster together, many psychologists proposed that a general conspiracy mentality serves as the underlying cause that generates specific beliefs. In a 2022 review led by Roland Imhoff, the authors argued that conspiracy mentality functions like a stable personality trait that predisposes people to accept individual conspiracy stories, and that questionnaires measuring this abstract mindset offer a purer, less politically biased tool than lists of specific theories.

Other evidence, however, indicates that general mentality and specific beliefs do not always move together. For instance, a five-wave panel study of American voters conducted around the 2020 presidential election found that beliefs in conspiracy theories about the opposing party rose among Trump voters and fell among Biden voters, while general conspiracy mentality remained relatively stable.

Some researchers have alternatively proposed that specific conspiracy beliefs form a mutually reinforcing web in which accepting one theory makes others seem more plausible, or even acts as a gateway that builds a general conspiratorial mindset. Supporting this network view, a 2022 cross-sectional study of American adults led by Matt Williams of Massey University in New Zealand, one of the authors of the new paper, found that statistical models treating conspiracy beliefs as an interconnected web fit survey data better than models assuming a single underlying trait. Similarly, multi-wave longitudinal research also led by Williams indicated that increases in believing one conspiracy theory predicted small increases in believing others over time, consistent with a mild “rabbit hole” effect.

Despite these ongoing debates, few studies had directly tested whether general conspiracy mentality and specific beliefs can be separated statistically across different cultures, or whether general mentality actually accounts for the links among specific beliefs. To investigate, Arturo Bertero, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Milan, together with Williams and colleagues, analyzed survey responses from nearly 30,000 participants across three comparative studies spanning 17 national samples. The analyses were not preregistered because the research design was developed after the data had been collected, though the team posted all data and statistical code publicly.

“Most of the field assumes the two are linked in a precise way: conspiracy mentality is a deep-seated mindset, and specific beliefs grow out of it,” Bertero told PsyPost. “A recent debate in the German journal Zeitschrift für Psychologie pointed out that conspiracy mentality has many definitions, and that this assumed link has little direct evidence behind it. Since almost every study relies on one of these two measures, we wanted to test it.”

Across all three studies, the researchers used network psychometrics, a set of statistical methods that maps how survey responses relate to one another without assuming in advance that a single hidden trait causes them. They first used exploratory graph analysis, which looks for clusters of questions that people tend to answer similarly, and confirmatory factor analysis, which tests how well a proposed grouping fits the data.

Next, the authors estimated partial correlation networks, which map survey items as points, called “nodes,” connected by lines representing the statistical links that remain between two items after accounting for every other item. To test the mentality-centered view, they placed a combined conspiracy mentality score into a network of individual specific conspiracy beliefs; if general mentality explains why specific beliefs go together, that score should absorb the links between them and sit as the most connected hub. They also ran the reverse test by placing a combined specific-beliefs score into a network of individual mentality questions. A hypothesis was formally supported in a country if resampling tests showed the summary score was reliably more connected than every individual item, falsified if it was reliably less connected than every item, and inconclusive for anything in between.

In Study 1, the researchers analyzed survey data collected in 2024 through the SUSPECTS project, a cross-national survey led by co-author Moreno Mancosu, across eight Western democracies: France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The dataset included quota-based online samples of roughly 2,500 adults per country. Participants rated their agreement from 1 to 5 with five general conspiracy mentality statements, such as the idea that secret groups manipulate world events, and eight specific, non-political conspiracy claims designed by three of the authors to be comparable across borders, including claims about chemtrails spraying harmful agents or governments secretly poisoning the public.

In all eight countries in Study 1, the grouping analyses confirmed that general conspiracy mentality and specific conspiracy beliefs formed two distinct dimensions. However, the mentality-centered network model was falsified in every country except France, where it was inconclusive. The general mentality score ranked as the least connected node in seven countries and second-least connected in France.

When the researchers tested the reverse, belief-centered network in Study 1, the combined score for specific conspiracy beliefs had the highest estimated connection strength in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It met the strict statistical threshold for outranking every individual mentality item only in France, leaving the other seven countries formally inconclusive, though none falsified the belief-centered model.

During peer review, at the reviewers’ encouragement, the researchers added Studies 2 and 3 to test the question with different questionnaires and countries. Study 2 examined politically and culturally prominent conspiracy theories within a single country by reanalyzing public survey data collected in May 2021 from a quota sample of 2,020 American adults for an earlier study by political scientist Adam Enders and his colleagues. Respondents rated their agreement from 1 to 5 with four general conspiracy mentality items and six specific conspiracy claims prominent in the United States, including allegations that Jeffrey Epstein was murdered to conceal elite wrongdoing and that figures like George Soros or Bill Gates orchestrate hidden plots.

In Study 2, an initial network clustering analysis grouped all 10 questions together, but a direct statistical model comparison confirmed that separating general mentality and specific beliefs into two factors fit the American responses better than a single factor. In contrast to Study 1, the results leaned toward the mentality-centered account. The general mentality score had the highest connection strength in the network of U.S. beliefs and was reliably more connected than three of the six belief items, with no belief item reliably more connected than it. The combined beliefs score was the second-least connected node in the reverse network, though both tests were formally inconclusive.

To test whether locally prominent conspiracy theories would produce a similar mentality-centered pattern across a wider range of countries, Study 3 reanalyzed public data from the Comparative Conspiracy Research Survey, gathered online between December 2022 and January 2023. This dataset covered 7,867 respondents across Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Lebanon, Morocco, South Africa, and the United States, with 899 to 1,028 participants per country. Respondents answered five general conspiracy mentality items on a 0-to-10 scale and four country-specific conspiracy beliefs on a 0-to-4 scale, mixing local narratives such as the Beirut port explosion or election fraud with globally circulating claims about COVID-19 and figures like Bill Gates.

In Study 3, the separation between general mentality and specific beliefs held up in Australia, Brazil, Germany, Lebanon, Morocco, and South Africa, whereas responses in Canada and the United States split into three smaller clusters. When the researchers examined the network hubs, the mentality-centered hypothesis was falsified in six countries and inconclusive in Morocco and the United States, with the general mentality score ranking lowest in connection strength across all eight nations. The belief-centered hypothesis was falsified in all eight countries.

To check whether these patterns were an artifact of combining different numbers of questions into summary scores, the team ran a resampling check that repeatedly dropped questions at random from the larger set, so mentality and beliefs had equal numbers of items, and re-estimated the networks without summary scores. Those checks echoed the main findings, with individual belief items tending to be more central in Study 1, mentality items acting as the main hubs in Study 2, and Study 3 showing a mixed pattern across countries. The main results also held under a different network-estimation method.

Summing up, Bertero noted that one of the three surveys leaned toward the mentality-centered account, while in the other two the mentality score usually ranked at the bottom of its network. “So there is no single pattern linking the two,” he explained. “When you read a study on conspiracy theories, keep in mind that its results depend in part on how beliefs and conspiracy mentality were measured.”

In the authors’ reading, the contrast between Studies 1 and 2 suggests that highly salient, context-bound conspiracy theories may overlap closely with the generalized suspicions captured by a particular mentality scale, whereas a broader cross-national battery of conspiracy claims may retain interconnections that a generic mentality score does not absorb. Still, the researchers note that Study 3 cautions against treating this explanation as a general rule, because using country-specific conspiracy theories there failed to place general mentality at the center of any national network.

Two theoretical interpretations remain open in the authors’ view: either a general mentality measure adds little once a set of conspiracy questions already captures what those beliefs share, or specific conspiracy beliefs form a partially self-sustaining web that cannot be reduced to an overarching mindset. The authors stress that their results do not mean conspiracy mentality measures should be abandoned. In their view, general measures may suit comparisons across countries and contexts, while measures of specific beliefs may better fit questions about particular events, and the choice should follow the research question.

There are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting these findings. Because all three studies analyzed cross-sectional survey responses gathered at a single point in time, the network maps only show which survey answers remain statistically linked after accounting for others, not how beliefs develop over time. Finding that specific beliefs or general mentality sit closer to the center of a network cannot establish whether a broad mentality causes people to adopt specific conspiracy theories, whether believing specific stories builds a general mindset, or whether individual beliefs actively reinforce one another.

“The theory we tested is about individuals: it says that conspiracy mentality shapes each person’s specific beliefs,” Bertero noted. “Our data cover nearly 30,000 people in 17 samples, but each person was surveyed only once.”

“A snapshot cannot show what comes first, so this paper does not settle the direction,” he continued. “A snapshot can show whether beliefs are arranged as the theory expects, with conspiracy mentality at the hub. In most of our samples, they were not.”

“Because researchers define conspiracy mentality in different ways, the theory linking it to specific beliefs has never been stated precisely,” he added. “Our test follows from the theory as we read it, and other tests are possible.” As a second caveat, Bertero noted that “a stronger test would follow the same people over time and see whether changes in one come before changes in the other.” “I would like to run that test with panel data, which follow the same people over time, but few panel surveys measure both,” he said.

In addition, the participant samples, countries, mentality questionnaires, and specific conspiracy theories all changed simultaneously from one study to the next, making it impossible to isolate which exact feature caused the results to flip between Study 2 and the other two studies. The authors also point out that specific conspiracy items on a questionnaire might remain connected to each other after accounting for conspiracy mentality simply because they share other features, such as being politically slanted, implausible, or appealing to people who want to feel uniquely informed. Future research could untangle these factors by administering multiple mentality scales and systematically varied lists of conspiracy theories to the same group of people, and by tracking how those networks evolve over time.

Bertero’s next goal touches on a point raised by social psychologist Roland Imhoff, lead author of the 2022 review described earlier: specific conspiracy beliefs are difficult to measure cleanly. “I also want to improve how we measure specific beliefs,” Bertero pointed out. “Conspiracy mentality now has many validated scales. Specific beliefs have received less attention because, as Roland Imhoff has rightly noted, they are much harder to measure: each item carries its own content, and which theories matter changes from one country and one moment to the next.”

Bertero credited the team’s mix of backgrounds, which spans psychology and political science. “Work like this happens when scientists from different disciplines meet,” he said. “I am grateful to my co-authors, Matt Williams, Federico Vegetti and Moreno Mancosu. Our mixed backgrounds let us approach a contested question in a new way.”

The study, “Searching for the Core of Conspiracy Belief Systems: The Relationship Between Specific Beliefs and Generic Mentality,” was authored by Arturo Bertero, Matt Williams, Federico Vegetti, and Moreno Mancosu.