A story has been circulating on social media for the past few weeks: scientists have identified the two traits that make a person prone to conspiracy theories. The story is interesting, and there is a real study behind it. But the version that reached most of us contains at least four claims that are not in the research at all.
This piece does two things. First it reports what the study actually found. Then it shows how those findings changed shape on the way to your feed. The second half may be the more useful one, because the real defence against conspiratorial thinking is the habit of tracing a claim back to its source.
What the researchers actually did
The study appeared in Applied Cognitive Psychology and was carried out by Adrian Furnham, Stephen Cuppello and David S. Semmelink. Furnham is based at the Norwegian Business School and has worked on this topic for years.
The team ran an online survey with 253 English-speaking adults. The largest groups of participants lived in Great Britain, South Africa, the United States and Canada. Their average age was around 49, and most held a university degree.
Conspiracy mentality was measured with a ten-item scale covering statements about secret organisations influencing political decisions and about government agencies monitoring citizens. Particular attention went to the idea of cover-ups, the belief that powerful institutions are deliberately hiding the truth and that the sceptics are the ones being fooled. One item asked whether politicians usually conceal the real motives behind their decisions.
Participants also reported their age, sex, political views and religious commitment, rated their own optimism, and said whether they saw the world as basically just or unjust. Finally they completed a personality assessment measuring six traits, among them tolerance of ambiguity, adjustment, competitiveness and risk approach.
Fourteen variables in total went into the analysis.
The two traits that stood out
First: difficulty tolerating uncertainty.
Psychologists call this tolerance of ambiguity, and it describes how a person responds to vague, incomplete or contradictory information. Participants who scored low on it were more likely to endorse conspiracy theories.
The logic is straightforward. When something significant happens and the honest explanation is messy, partial and boring, some people find that state genuinely hard to sit in. A conspiracy theory supplies exactly what reality is failing to supply: a clean, complete, unambiguous story with a named culprit and a clear motive.
Second: the sense that the world is fundamentally unjust.
Participants who felt the world is basically unfair were more inclined to believe that powerful groups are secretly steering events.
This is not irrational either. The belief that good things happen to good people functions as a psychological support. When it collapses, what remains is a feeling of powerlessness. A conspiracy theory offers an odd sort of comfort against that, because it says your misfortune was not blind chance. Someone did it on purpose. At least somebody is in control.
A third factor was also statistically significant: strength of religious commitment. Of the fourteen variables examined, these three were the ones that held up, and together they accounted for roughly a fifth of the variation in conspiracy scores.
Do not skip past that last sentence. A fifth also means that around eighty percent of the variation is left unexplained by this study.
The most interesting result: education made no difference
Holding a university degree had no relationship with conspiracy belief. Neither did the personality trait of curiosity.
That undercuts the common assumption that conspiracy belief is a problem of ignorance. Educated people are just as susceptible, provided the underlying psychological need is there. The gap is not in information. It is in how much discomfort uncertainty produces.
This also explains why arguing with facts so often fails. You are answering a question that was never being asked.
Now the parts that were not in the research
Several claims in the widely shared version are either wrong or not drawn from the study.
- “The tendency was strongest among younger men.” The age effect was small, and the sex finding runs the other way: women showed a slightly higher tendency than men. This is a straight reversal.
- “It was not about intelligence.” Intelligence was never measured. You cannot draw a conclusion about a variable you did not collect.
- “Researchers found an authoritarian streak among believers.” Authoritarianism does not appear as a measured variable in the study’s abstract or in the detailed reporting of it. The personality instrument used does not include that trait. This line reads as the writer’s own interpretation rather than a finding.
- “Participants came from the US, UK, Canada and Australia.” The detailed reporting lists Great Britain, South Africa, the United States and Canada. South Africa was dropped and Australia added.
- “Three traits stood out, but two mattered most.” The third was never named. In the study, the three personality traits that correlated were adjustment, tolerance of ambiguity and competitiveness.
None of this needs to be deliberate. As a finding travels from a journal article to one website, then another, then a Facebook post, something gets sharpened at each step and something gets dropped. What arrives is a claim more compelling and less accurate than the original.
The study’s own limits
Fairness requires applying the same standard to the paper itself.
This is correlational work. It does not establish that discomfort with uncertainty causes conspiratorial thinking. The relationship could run the other way, or both could follow from something else entirely.
The sample was 253 people, which is thin for an analysis of fourteen variables. The authors acknowledge that this limited their power to detect smaller effects.
Participants were predominantly middle-aged, educated professionals, which is not a cross-section of any general population.
And the point that matters most for readers here: everyone surveyed came from Western or English-speaking societies. The results involving religious commitment and political orientation sit inside that specific context. Transferring them directly onto Pakistan is an additional assumption that this study does not license.
What to take from it
If the central finding holds, then the remedy for conspiratorial thinking is not more information.
The skill that matters is being able to say “I don’t know” without agitation. Being able to live with an incomplete explanation. Accepting that some events simply do not have a tidy, satisfying story behind them.
That tolerance can be built. Every time we chase a viral claim back to its origin and look at what changed along the way, we are practising it.
That is what this article did. You can do the same thing next time.
References
- Furnham, A., Cuppello, S., & Semmelink, D. S. (2025). Conspiracy Theory Mentality, Injustice and Tolerance of Ambiguity. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 39(6). DOI: 10.1002/acp.70151
- Detailed report at PsyPost
- Report and comments from Furnham at IFLScience
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