A threat-complexity hypothesis of conspiracy thinking during the COVID-19 pandemic: Cross-national and longitudinal evidence of a three-way interaction effect of financial strain, disempowerment and paranoia

One way to cope with crises is by attributing their ultimate causes to malevolent conspiracies. As crises are rarely simple, and may involve an interplay between multiple, co-occurring threats, we suggest that conspiracy thinking mainly occurs among individuals who experience conditions of threat complexity – such as socioeconomic vulnerability paired with a sense of helplessness in society, and who are also sufficiently paranoid to infer a conspiracy. In the present study, we focused on financial strain and disempowerment, as two relevant threats which were both dramatically affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, and hypothesized a three-way interaction between financial strain, disempowerment and paranoia in predicting conspiracy thinking. This hypothesis was supported in both cross-national (N = 64,130) and longitudinal data (N = 11,159), collected during the COVID-19 pandemic. Implications of the results for understanding the tendency to reduce multiple threats to a single cause are discussed.