Losers are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories, study finds

You should link to the actual study, not to a yellow press blog post. If you do that you then need to explain what a 'loser' is, because that's a subjective truth.

Of the top of my head I can name three big conspiracies that played before our eyes and were only later uncovered to the public:

* weapons and mass destruction and invasion on Iraq * mass surveillance and data collection program by the US government * Project MKUltra

Not to mention countless of conspiracies in European football that enabled individuals to get rich by rigging matches. A theory itself is nothing wrong, otherwise you could say that most science is nonsense.

There are theories that have been proven incorrect and are completely crazy to believe in; flat Earth or fake Moon landing for example. Those theories you could say are most likely to be believed by intellectually lowered population, but you need to be careful with generalising. If you simply say 'conspiracy theories' and don't discuss at length which types of conspiracy theories you're referring to, you are labelling everyone who posses critical thinking faculties as a 'loser'.

We need to be scientifically rigid when looking for correlation and drawing conclusions, otherwise we are merely expressing our opinion under the label of science misleading the reader as a result. That's bad science.

I think political "losers" (Democrats when a Republican is in office and the reverse) and social "losers" (the disenfranchised, unsuccessful, fringe) are maybe not being separated enough in the title, which seems to be more about the former and less about what underlying conditions make one person more predisposed to believing in conspiracies. The paper briefly touches on the latter, but is more about the former, and uses the term "electoral losers" which is more accurate but less exciting.

Essentially when your guy is in office, the people shouting foul player are conspiracy nutsos, but when their guy is in office they're truth seeking concerned citizens.

Also worth noting the article is from 2017, and the survey used from before and after the 2012 election. It would be interesting to see if such beliefs have increased since then.

> “Now that Trump is president, the popular conspiracy theories come from Democrats and focus on Trump and Russia,”

Honest question: are there really all that many conspiracy theory about Trump and Russia? From what I've read of first-hand sources, there's a whole lot of evidence in the public record that demonstrates repeated exchanges between high-level Russian officials and the Trump administration before and after the election. That's not even getting into the impeachment scandal which had numerous accounts and record indicating that Trump did exactly what he was accused of.

I think that's much, much different in scope than something like Anti-vaxxers or "COVID-19 is Bill Gates' attempt at population control".

In the first case, people are extrapolating based on concrete evidence, and in the latter, people are literally making shit up. I think 9/11 Truthers are a better comparison.

The whole framing of this is part of why there's so much division in this country and, well, why so many people believe in conspiracy theories.

Try this:

"The marginalized, lonely, isolated, and disadvantaged are more likely to distrust established institutions, making them more likely to believe allegations of wrongdoing by those institutions even if those allegations are unfounded."

It is quite sad to see how Americans think that they are controlling the narrative but have instead become puppets of Russian disinformation campaigns fueled by their own useful idiots.

It is quite pathetic that the increase in the infection rate stopped on 4th March but has stayed constant for a month instead of decreasing.

> “Now that Trump is president, the popular conspiracy theories come from Democrats and focus on Trump and Russia,” Uscinski said. “Conspiracy theories follow the ebb and flow of power and losers tend to propagate them the most.”

The president consistently and loudly claims that there is a conspiracy against him from all facets of the government and the media. I am incredibly skeptical to the validity of this study.