Looking for Ties with Secret Agendas During the Pandemic: Conspiracy Mentality is Associated with Reduced Trust in Political, Medical, and Scientific Institutions – but Not in Medical Personnel
| Title: | Looking for Ties with Secret Agendas During the Pandemic: Conspiracy Mentality is Associated with Reduced Trust in Political, Medical, and Scientific Institutions – but Not in Medical Personnel |
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| Authors: | Kenzo Nera, Youri L. Mora, Pit Klein, Antoine Roblain, Pascaline Van Oost, Julie Terache, Olivier Klein |
| Source: | Psychologica Belgica, Vol 62, Iss 1 (2022) |
| Publisher Information: | Ubiquity Press, 2022. |
| Publication Year: | 2022 |
| Collection: | LCC:Psychology |
| Subject Terms: | covid-19, trust, conspiracy mentality, conspiracy theories, populism, power, public health measures, Psychology, BF1-990 |
| More Details: | In a preregistered research, we examined the relationships between conspiracy mentality (i.e., the individual susceptibility to endorse conspiracy theories, Bruder et al., 2013) and trust in three actors of the COVID-19 crisis: 1) Political institutions, 2) scientific and medical institutions, and 3) the medical personnel. While the two former groups have played a direct or indirect role in decisions related to public health measures, the latter has not. We expected all these relationships to be negative and mediated by the belief that the pandemic is instrumentalized by authorities to pursue secret agendas. In a study conducted with Belgian ('N' = 1136) and French ('N' = 374) convenience samples, conspiracy mentality negatively predicted trust in political institutions, and trust in scientific and medical institutions. These relations were partly mediated by belief that the pandemic is instrumentalized by authorities. In addition, distrust in political, medical and scientific institutions were highly and positively correlated, suggesting that these groups may be viewed as part of a same supra-ordinate category – the “Elites”. By contrast, we found a small negative relationship between conspiracy mentality and trust in the medical personnel in the Belgian sample, but not in the French sample. Trust in the medical personnel was unrelated to the belief that the pandemic is instrumentalized, and only weakly related to distrust in political institutions. This suggests that individuals with a susceptibility to believe in conspiracy theories may not have a propensity to distrust all actors involved in the management of the pandemic, but only those directly or indirectly tied to decisions pertaining to public health measures. |
| Document Type: | article |
| File Description: | electronic resource |
| Language: | English |
| ISSN: | 2054-670X 58087370 |
| Relation: | https://www.psychologicabelgica.com/articles/1086; https://doaj.org/toc/2054-670X |
| DOI: | 10.5334/pb.1086 |
| Access URL: | https://doaj.org/article/bb58087370fa4bacb157e7508bcf3944 |
| Accession Number: | edsdoj.bb58087370fa4bacb157e7508bcf3944 |
| Database: | Directory of Open Access Journals |
| ISSN: | 2054670X 58087370 |
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| DOI: | 10.5334/pb.1086 |
| Published in: | Psychologica Belgica |
| Language: | English |