The Mindsets of Conspiracy and Paranormal Believers

In the past decade, conspiracy theories, such as the belief that climate change is a hoax, have spread rapidly. Many people also believe in paranormal or supernatural phenomena, such as ghosts, apparitions and ESP. What causes these beliefs, and how those who believe in elaborate plots by the government differ from those who believe that they have psychic abilities, warrants further exploration. This paper is a review of several studies that have been done on the psychological profiles of those who believe in both conspiracy theories and paranormal phenomena; their similarities as well as their differences. Both conspiracy and paranormal believers are more prone to hyperactive agency detection - the tendency to detect agency or an underlying cause behind a chance event (Blackmoore & Moore, 1994; Elk, et al., 2014) - and are more prone to seeking meaning and patterns in random stimuli. While believers in paranormal phenomena often exhibit a lack of an ability to judge randomness, a low prior for randomness has been found to have little to no effect on one's belief in conspiracy theories (Dieguez et al, 2015). Paranormal believers show a belief that they have greater control over their environment, which conflicts with the conspiracy group's tendency to feel a general lack of control (Prooijen & Acker, 2015). Conspiracy believers also exhibit motivations that are more geared towards social acceptance and being part of an 'in-group' (Cichocka et al, 2016). Understanding the reasoning behind these fringe beliefs can better help scientists, publicists, and others who work in circulating information appeal to those who are prone to differing thought processes.