The Paranoid Style in American Politics Revisited: An Ideological Asymmetry in Conspiratorial Thinking

“Let us now abstract the basic elements in the paranoid style. The central image is that of a vast and sinister conspiracy, a gigantic and yet subtle machinery of influence set in motion to undermine and destroy a way of life.” (Richard Hofstadter, 1964, p. 29)

A conspiratorial mindset is characterized by a persistent belief that one or more individuals, groups, or organizations are plotting to accomplish menacing objectives (van der Linden, 2013; Moscovici, 1987). In the present era, in which fake news and misinformation are spread quickly and easily through social media platforms, belief in conspiracy theories is widespread; it is estimated that more than 50% of Americans endorse at least one conspiracy theory (Oliver & Wood, 2014). For society, there are many troubling consequences of conspiratorial thinking, including antisocial behavior, hostility against outgroups, rejection of science, decreased trust in government, and a lack of civic engagement (Einstein & Glick, 2015; Flynn, Nyhan, & Reifler, 2017; Jolley & Douglas, 2014; Lewandowsky & Oberauer, 2016; van der Linden, 2015; Swami, 2012; Uscinski & Parent, 2014).

For all of these reasons, it is important to understand the sociocognitive factors that shape public belief in conspiracy theories. A number of studies suggest that conspiratorial thinking is associated with paranoia, narcissism, interpersonal distrust, feelings of powerlessness, lack of agency and control, uncertainty, low levels of education and intelligence, as well as “magical thinking,” defined as the superstitious tendency to draw false inferences about causal relationships (Abalakina‐Paap, Stephan, Craig, & Gregory, 1999; Barron, Morgan, Towell, Altemeyer, & Swami, 2014; Brotherton, French, & Pickering, 2013; Cichocka, Marchlewska, & de Zavala, 2016; Darwin, Neave, & Holmes, 2011; Lobato, Mendoza, Sims, & Chin, 2014; van Prooijen, 2017; van Prooijen & Jostmann, 2013; Swami, 2012; Swami, Voracek, Stieger, Tran, & Furnham, 2014). Increasingly, researchers are coming to appreciate the role of political ideology—defined as the beliefs, opinions, and values about the way society is and how it should be (Jost, 2006)—in fostering conspiratorial thinking (Imhoff, 2015; Miller, Saunders, & Farhart, 2015; Oliver & Wood, 2014; Pasek, Stark, Krosnick, & Tompson, 2015; van Prooijen, Krouwel, & Pollet, 2015). Zeroing in on the effects of political ideology is appropriate and necessary because a high proportion of conspiracy theories are political in nature (Sunstein & Vermeule, 2009). This is why recent formulations have conceptualized conspiratorial thinking as a generalized political attitude (Imhoff & Bruder, 2014; Sutton & Douglas, 2020) that is “intrinsically tied to the sociopolitical realm” (Imhoff & Lamberty, 2018, p. 911).

There are historical, philosophical, and psychological reasons to suppose that political ideology plays a prominent role in conspiratorial thinking (Bennett, 1995; Jost, Stern, Rule, & Sterling, 2017; Lipset & Raab, 1978; Robin, 2004). In a major contribution to social history, Richard Hofstadter (1964) documented a long history of “paranoid” thinking that contributed to right‐wing political movements in the United States throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, including nativistic, anti‐Masonic, anti‐Catholic, and anti‐Mormon organizations; opposition to the income tax amendment to the U.S. Constitution and Franklin D. Roosevelt's “New Deal”; the John Birch Society and the “Red Scare” that motivated Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti‐Communist purges; and the presidential campaigns of Robert Taft, Barry Goldwater, and George Wallace. Hofstadter described several ways in which “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” contributed to a wide range of right‐wing movements that—following Adorno, Frenkel‐Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford (1950)—he characterized as “pseudo‐conservative” because they “believe themselves to be conservatives and usually employ the rhetoric of conservatism” but “have little in common with the temperate and compromising spirit of true conservatism in the classical sense of the word” and “show signs of a serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions, and institutions” (Hofstadter, 1954/1955, p. 3).

In contemporary American politics, many citizens on the right believe that evidence of anthropogenic climate change is merely the product of a vast conspiracy involving scientists, liberal politicians, and foreign governments (Public Policy Polling, 2013). By the middle of 2017, Donald Trump had sent over 100 Twitter messages claiming that global warming is a hoax (Matthews, 2017). President Trump has also promulgated many other conspiracy theories over the years (Shear et al., 2019), including claims that Barack Obama is a Muslim who was born outside of the United States and that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was murdered (Haberman, 2016). Trump supporters routinely push conspiracy theories about liberals and Democrats to deflect criticism over Russian involvement in the 2016 Presidential election, the impeachment case against Trump, and his administration's mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 (Levin, 2020).

Yet, conspiratorial thinking is by no means confined to President Trump's inner circle. According to a YouGov poll, 70% of Republicans in 2019 believed that a secret “deep state” network was attempting to overthrow President Trump (Frankovic, 2019). In addition, paranoid reactions to gun control legislation that Hofstadter (1964, p. 5) described more than 50 years ago are eerily similar to sentiments expressed by supporters of the National Rifle Association (NRA) in recent years. Many self‐identified conservatives are deeply distrusting not only of scientists but also of government officials and media journalists, all of whom they routinely accuse of “liberal bias” (Gauchat, 2012; Jones, 2004; Kraft, Lodge, & Taber, 2014; Lee, 2005; Pew Research Center, 2017; van der Linden, Panagopoulos, & Roozenbeek, 2020).

Still, commentators are quick to point out that “conspiracy theories aren't just for conservatives” (Moore, Parent, & Uscinksi, 2014). Some conspiracy theories are assumed to be more popular on the left. In the United States, these include the claims that President George W. Bush possessed advance knowledge of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and chose not to intervene; that agricultural businesses are suppressing evidence of the harmful effects of genetically modified organisms (or GMOs); and that childhood vaccinations pushed by “Big Pharmaceutical Companies” cause autism and other serious health problems (Sunstein & Vermeule, 2009). With respect to antivaccination sentiment, research by Rabinowitz, Latella, Stern, and Jost (2016) found that—contrary to many political stereotypes—U.S. liberals were significantly more likely than conservatives to endorse provaccination statements and to regard them as facts rather than beliefs. The finding that opposition to vaccines is actually more prominent on the right than the left has been reported in several other studies as well (e.g., see Lewandowsky, Gignac, & Oberauer, 2013; Lewandowsky, Woike, & Oberauer, 2020).

Nonetheless, there is some reason to suspect that ideological extremism—on both the left and right—is associated with conspiracist ideation (Bartlett & Miller, 2010; Imhoff, 2015; McClosky & Chong, 1985; van Prooijen et al., 2015). However, it does not follow from these or other research programs that those on the left and right are equally susceptible to conspiracy theorizing. For example, close inspection of results reported by Miller et al. (2015, p. 830) indicate that right‐wing extremists in the United States were more likely than left‐wing extremists to endorse ideologically congenial conspiracy theories. Moreover, even in studies that appear to provide evidence of ideological symmetry in general, there are often notable asymmetries, suggesting that conservative rightists are more conspiratorially minded than liberal leftists (e.g., see van Prooijen et al., 2015, pp. 573–575, Figures 1 and 3, and Oliver & Wood, 2014, p. 958, Figure 1). These asymmetries are consistent with an observation about cognitive‐motivational style made by Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, and Sulloway (2003b), namely that: “In all cases graphically summarized by McClosky and Chong (1985, p. 350),… the percentage of high scorers from the far right group (63% and 81% for intolerance of ambiguity in 1958 and 1976—1977, respectively, and 39% for rigidity) exceeds the percentage of high scorers from the far left (49%, 75%, and 33%, respectively)” (p. 388).

In an effort to integrate more than 50 years of theory and research on the social, cognitive, and motivational bases of left‐right (or, in the U.S. context, liberal‐conservative) differences, Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, and Sulloway (2003a, 2003b) emphasized individual differences and contextual variability in epistemic needs to attain order, certainty, structure, and closure and existential needs to attain safety, security, and a sense of reassurance. The idea was that these needs would contribute to an ideological preparedness for resistance to social change and the legitimation of social, economic, and political inequality. Consistent with this perspective, a meta‐analytic review of 88 studies conducted in 12 countries over a 44‐year period involving over 22,000 participants confirmed that intolerance of ambiguity, dogmatism, avoidance of uncertainty, cognitive simplicity, and personal needs for order, structure, and closure, as well as death anxiety and system‐level threats, were positively related to the endorsement of a conservative, right‐wing ideology.

In an extension of this theoretical program, we posit that there may well be an important and underappreciated ideological asymmetry when it comes to conspiratorial thinking in general, at least in the context of the United States. Such an asymmetry would be consistent with mounting evidence that, in comparison with liberals, conservatives in the United States and other Western countries score higher on measures of dogmatism, cognitive rigidity, intolerance of ambiguity and uncertainty, self‐deception, and threat sensitivity—and lower on measures of need for cognition, integrative complexity, cognitive reflection, intelligence, and analytical reasoning (see Jost, 2017). Conservatives are also more likely to adopt an “intuitive” cognitive style (Deppe et al., 2015; Talhelm et al., 2015), which tends to be associated with conspiratorial thinking (Lobato et al., 2014; Swami et al., 2014).

American conservatives are also less interested in scientific forms of knowledge (Blank & Shaw, 2015; Carl, Cofnas, & Woodley of Menie, 2016; Lewandowsky & Oberauer, 2016; Tullett, Hart, Feinberg, Fetterman, & Gottlieb, 2016) and more likely to mistake political opinions for facts (Landreville & Niles, 2019). They appear to be more receptive to “fake news” (Basol, Roozenbeek, & van der Linden, 2020; Roozenbeek & van der Linden, 2019) and pseudo‐profound “bullshit” (Nilsson, Erlandsson, & Västfjäll, 2019; Pfattheicher & Schindler, 2016; Sterling, Jost, & Pennycook, 2016). Consistent with all of these psychological differences, research suggests that in the United States, at least, rumors, misinformation, and conspiracy theories spread more rapidly and extensively in the social networks of conservatives, as compared with liberals (Benkler, Faris, Roberts, & Zuckerman, 2017; Guess, Nagler, & Tucker, 2019; Guess, Nyhan, & Reifler, 2020; Jost, van der Linden, Panagopoulos, & Hardin, 2018). This was observed, for instance, in the early days of the SARS‐2/COVID‐19 pandemic: Right‐wing news outlets such as Fox News and Breitbart were much more likely than mainstream news outlets to spread misinformation, including conspiracy theories about the virus, and citizens who consumed more right‐wing news held more false beliefs about the pandemic (Motta, Stecula, & Farhart, 2020).Thus, although many perspectives in social science would suggest that motivated reasoning, biased information processing, and conspiratorial thinking should be equally prevalent among leftists and rightists (Ditto et al., 2019; Kahan, 2016; McClosky & Chong, 1985; Moore et al., 2014; Oliver & Wood, 2014; van Prooijen et al., 2015; Sunstein & Vermeule, 2009; Uscinski, Klofstad, & Atkinson, 2016), there are ample empirical reasons to question this assumption (see also Baron & Jost, 2019). The fact that “conspiracy theories are not just for conservatives” (Moore et al., 2014) does not mean that conspiracies are endorsed at the same scale or level of intensity by liberals and conservatives nor that conspiracy theories on the left and right are equally harmful, fallacious, or driven by paranoid ideation.

Several previous studies suggest that the tendency to endorse conspiracy theories is positively and linearly associated with authoritarianism and right‐wing extremism (Abalakina‐Paap et al., 1999; Bruder, Haffke, Neave, Nouripanah, & Imhoff, 2013; Grzesiak‐Feldman & Irzycka, 2009; Swami, 2012). Historically, it is conspicuous that conspiracy theories have so often been used against popular targets of right‐wing prejudice, such as Jews, Blacks, leftists, feminists, and sexual minorities (Altemeyer, 1996; Grzesiak‐Feldman, 2015; Krekó, 2015; Pasek et al., 2015; Swami, 2012). The question of whether an ideological asymmetry exists is therefore important, not only for research in political psychology, but also for a practical understanding of how, why, and when conspiratorial thinking may shape public consciousness—and how interventions might be designed to root it out.