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Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews
Here, the authors show that elevated loneliness in adolescence and increasing loneliness over three decades is associated with heightened conspiracy beliefs in midlife.
Factors such as personality traits, paranoid tendencies, and lower cognitive abilities, or experiences such as economic deprivation and selective media exposure might predispose individuals to both loneliness 47 and conspiracist worldviews 1, 48, 49, 50. Investigating the relationship between loneliness and conspiracist worldviews at the country level could bring further insights into the role of context, including cultural values (e.g., individualism-collectivism 1, 54, 58, and other nation-level variables such as general political climate, corruption, autocracy, or economic dysfunction 1, 49. Research might also explore how effects differ when examining beliefs in specific conspiracy theories, oftentimes deeply rooted in culture and sociopolitical divides, as opposed to the broad conspiracist worldview our study focused on.
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