Conspiracy mentality differently shapes interpersonal trust when money or digital privacy is at stake

ABSTRACT

To believe in conspiracy theories is to suspect that (powerful) others are plotting behind one’s back. Conspiracy beliefs might be therefore an issue of (dis)trust. In this study, we sought to explore whether this association is modulated by the way trust is operationalised and by the specific target to whom trust is directed. In doing so, we used two proxies of trust: (i) money investment within a hypothetical version of the trust game and (ii) the likelihood of disclosing a personal digital information (i.e. password). Then we presented participants with a set of trustees representing different social categories and having different degrees of closeness to the participants. Our results showed that when trust was expressed as money investment, higher levels of conspiracy mentality were associated to less trust towards powerful categories, such as ingroup politicians, scientists, public organisations, pharmaceutical and textile CEOs. Conversely, when trust was expressed as the likelihood of disclosing one’s own password, this association was observed only when the trustee was an ingroup politician. Here, we demonstrated that the negative association between conspiracy mentality and trust is not a uniform phenomenon, rather is subject to the expression of trust and to its specific targets.

KEYWORDS:

• Conspiracy mentality
• interpersonal trust
• digital security
• monetary investment
• political intergroup bias

Ackowledgements

We thank the EU COST Network on ‘Comparative Analysis of Conspiracy Theories' (COMPACT Action) for inspiring this work. We thank Ambra Saraceno for her suggestions on the measures employed in this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Authors contribution

Michael Schepisi, Giuseppina Porciello, Maria Serena Panasiti and Silvia Mari contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation and data collection were performed by Michael Schepisi, Giuseppina Porciello, Maria Serena Panasiti and Silvia Mari. Analyses were performed by Michael Schepisi, Giuseppina Porciello and Maria Serena Panasiti. Michael Schepisi, Giuseppina Porciello, Maria Serena Panasiti and Biljana Gjoneska interpreted the results. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Michael Schepisi. Giuseppina Porciello, Maria Serena Panasiti, Silvia Mari, Biljana Gjoneska and Roland Imhoff revised previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Ethics approval

As part of a large international project, the present study falls under a cluster of ethics approvals of studies on conspiracy theories, secured by one of the leading institutions in the project. The present research was conducted in accordance with the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki.

Consent

Participants completed the survey on voluntary basis and give their informed consent to participate in the study.

Data availability statement

Dataset and script for the analyses of the present study are available in Mendeley repository at this link: https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/fxn3zwd4vp/1.

Additional information

Funding

This research was partially supported by 2017-ATE-0007 grant from University of Milano-Bicocca.

Notes on contributors

Michael Schepisi

Michael Schepisi (Ph.D) is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the human sciences department of the University of Verona. He received his Ph.D. at the Sapienza University of Rome with a thesis on the role of political ideology in social cognition, with a particular focus on prejudice and moral decision-making. His research interests embrace the study of neuro-psycho-social determinants of intergroup bias.

Biljana Gjoneska

Biljana Gjoneska (MD, Ph.D.) is a tenured research associate at the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts (MK). Her work includes cross-cultural investigations of group-based and internet-related behaviours, involving social psychological aspects (e.g. the online spread of conspiracy theories, mistrust and misinformation) and health problems (i.e. various forms of internet addiction). She serves in the capacity of assistant director of the Psychological Science Accelerator's (PSA) Ethics Committee, management committee member in a couple of EU COST Actions and national representative in several international collaborations in behavioural sciences.

Silvia Mari

Silvia Mari (Ph.D.) is an associate professor at the University of Milano-Bicocca. She serves as coordinator of the undergraduate programme in psychology in the department of psychology. Her research interests include the determinants of attitudes and beliefs, including conspiratorial thinking and their behavioural consequences, applied to various domains such as political psychology, health psychology and intergroup relations. She is a member of international scientific societies, including ISPP and EASP, and of many collaborative research networks.

Maria Serena Panasiti

Maria Serena Panasiti is an associate professor in clinical psychology at the psychology department of the Sapienza University of Rome. She is interested in studying social cognition in clinical and healthy populations. Her main research topic regards the effects of (impaired) interoception or emotional processing on social/moral decision-making.

Giuseppina Porciello

Giuseppina Porciello (Ph.D.) is a non-tenure track professor at the department of psychology at the Sapienza University of Rome. She also works as a clinical researcher at the AgliotiLAB and Santa Lucia Hospital in Rome. Her research primarily revolves around the role of bodily signals in the awareness of one's own body and their influence on higher-order cognitive, emotional and social processes. She also examines the behavioural and physiological aspects of in-group and out-group processes, with a particular focus on ethnicity and political ideology. She is a member of the Italian Psychological Association (AIP) and the Italian Society of Psychophysiology and Cognitive Neuroscience (SIPF).

Roland Imhoff

Roland Imhoff is chair of social and legal psychology at the Johannes-Gutenberg-University of Mainz. Part of his research focuses on social-cognitive underpinnings of political behaviour and attitudes with an emphasis on conspiracy mentality as a generalised worldview. He is a member of the “German Society for Psychology”'s task force on conspiracy theories and a member of the EASP Executive Committee.