Conspiracy theories are defined as essentially false narratives in which multiple agents are believed to be working together towards malicious ends.

Douglas et al.
(2019) note that these are attempts to explain the root causes of significant social and political events through claims of secret conspiracies involving two or more powerful agents.
The copious number of people giving credence to conspiracy theories has attracted a great deal of research.
A recent study found that belief in conspiracy theories is associated with a number of personality disorder characteristics and psychopathological symptoms (Bowes et al., 2021).
Conspiracy theories have been reported to help make sense of events that are considered confusing, difficult to understand, or poorly explained by traditional information sources.
There may also be maladaptive cognitive-perceptive traits that contribute to the formation or maintenance of conspiracy theories (Van Elk, 2015).
Studies have explored the link between conspiracy theory beliefs and traits such as paranoia, magical ideation, and paranormal belief, finding positive associations between conspiracy theory beliefs and schizotypy (Darwin et al., 2011; Swami et al. ., 2016).
In particular, they suggested that the suspicious traits seen in highly schizotypical individuals may lead to disbelief in official or mainstream sources of information.
Goreis and Voracek (2019) noted that conspiracy theories appeal to those who feel disconnected from society, unhappy with their life, and who have a worldview that includes unusual beliefs, experiences and thoughts.
Furnham and Grover's (2021) study explored the relationship between belief in conspiracy theories and personality disorders.
The study involved 450 British individuals on average twenty-nine, including 240 men.
The degree of education found among the participants was: 31% high school diploma, 36% bachelor's degree and 19% post graduate diploma.
Furthermore, 73% of the participants declared themselves not religious at all and 4% very religious.
Study subjects were recruited online, using the Prolific platform and ensuring data anonymity.
The established reward for participation was 1.50.
Four self-report questionnaires were used to verify the starting hypotheses.
Personality information was collected using the Coolidge Axis-II Inventory Short Form (SCATI) (Coolidge, 2001) and the Structured Assessment of Personality Abbreviated Scale (SAPAS) (Moran et al., 2003).
The first refers to a categorical approach, that is linked to the diagnostic criteria proposed in the DSM, the second has a dimensional and less structured nature.
The 15-item Belief in Conspiracy Theories (BCTI) scale was used to measure beliefs related to conspiracy theories (Swami et al., 2010, 2011).
In this phase, participants rated the validity of the conspiracies on a 9-point scale where 1 was completely false and 9 was completely true.
The fourth test proposed Intelligence (Grover, 2018), a 10-item questionnaire to evaluate the intelligence quotient, also based on the cultural knowledge of the subjects (eg.
What is the unit of measurement of sound intensity?).
Finally, to assess the level of self-esteem, participants were asked to give a score from 0 to 100 where 0 indicated Very Low and 100 Very High (Furnham & Horne, 2021).
The positive correlations that emerged from the Furnham & Grover (2021) study show that conspiracy theories can be associated with a wide range of ailments.
The relationships between sadistic traits and conspiracy theories and self-defeating traits and conspiracy theories are of particular relevance.
The first can be explained by the desire to scare and intimidate others while the correlation between self-harming traits and conspiracy theories could be motivated by the combination of negativity, sadness and preference for people leading to disappointment, failure or mistreatment associated with this type. of strokes.
The results showed that higher-order clusters are the clearest predictors of conspiracy theories, especially cluster A which includes paranoid, schizoid, and schizotypal personality disorder.
The common features of these disorders are social inhibition, social withdrawal, the predominance of distorted thinking and a lack of synchrony with the surrounding world (Esterberg et al., 2010).
Two other variables related to conspiracy theories are: the level of education and intelligence (IQ).
Specifically, it would seem that more educated people are more skeptical, less religious and therefore less attracted to conspiracy theories (Goreis & Voracek, 2019).
Therefore, education and training are thought to be among the best tools to counter the spread of beliefs in conspiracy theories.
The SAPAS scale (Moran et al., 2003) did not provide significantly useful research data.
It suggests that brief screening measures of personality disorders are not sufficiently useful for exploring the relationship between personality disorders or pathological traits and conspiracy theories.
The present study has potential limits such as transversality, self-administration of tests, the impossibility of deducing the causal relationship between the variables and overestimates related to statistics.
The authors suggest for future research on conspiracy theories to explore additional personality variables not previously implicated in the research (Furnham & Grover, 2021).
People with personality disorders have altered levels of empathy and intimacy seeking, but with differences depending on the type of disorder
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