Resolving the puzzle of conspiracy worldview and political activism: Belief in secret plots decreases normative but increases non-normative political engagement.

Abstract

It is a hitherto open and debated question whether the belief in conspiracies increases or attenuates the willingness to engage in political action. In the present paper, we tested the notion, whether a) the relation between belief in conspiracies and general political engagement is curvilinear (inverted U-shaped) and b) there may be opposing relations to normative vs. non-normative forms of political engagement. Two pre-registered experiments (N = 194; N = 402) support both propositions and show that the hypothetical adoption of a worldview that sees the world as governed by secret plots attenuates reported intentions to participate in normative, legal forms of political participation but increases reported intentions to employ non-normative, illegal means of political articulation. These results provide first evidence for the notion that political extremism and violence might seem an almost logical conclusion when seeing the world as governed by conspiracies.