Conspiracy Believers often demonstrate psychological problems

The argument

According to research, people who believe in conspiracy theories are more likely to show certain personality traits: distrust, Machiavellianism, and low agreeability. Machiavellianism here refers to being more interested in pushing one's own agenda forward through manipulative and deceitful behaviour, and low agreeability refers to uncooperative and undependable traits. Taken together, the cluster describes someone disposed to assume that others are concealing their motives and acting against them — which is the shape of a conspiracy theory before any particular theory is encountered. Conspiracy theories are beliefs based on paranoia and fear rather than on evidence or facts, so what draws a person to them is not the strength of the case but a prior readiness to find such a case convincing. If the explanation runs through psychology rather than evidence, the consequences follow the psychology too. Negative beliefs and a sense of alienation can lead a person to act on dangerous impulses, as with the perpetrators of the Pittsburgh shooting and the pizzeria attack. The theories themselves are not weapons, but a firm belief in one can cause someone to act in a violent, weaponized manner — because a person who is convinced that a hidden harm is being done and that no legitimate authority will stop it has been given a reason to act alone. The harm is not confined to the believer either. People who refuse vaccines because of conspiracy theories are likely to put entire communities at risk, including people who never encountered the theory. That is what makes this more than a private matter of belief: the same psychological features that make a person susceptible also make their beliefs consequential for everyone around them.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Many conspiracy theories have been proven to be accurate, which unburdens the believers from the stereotype of having psychological problems. For instance, the conspiracy that the government is spying on their citizens was proven correct in 2016, when the government sent requests for user data to Facebook, Apple, and Google.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The correlations are reported with no source, effect size or direction, and traits such as low agreeableness are not psychological problems, which is what the argument's own conclusion calls them. An association at the population level also says nothing about any individual believer. [Rejecting P2] Two attacks are not evidence about a general population, and the premise treats the consequences of belief as evidence about its causes, which is what the question asks about; vaccine refusal is likewise an outcome. The argument is weakest where it looks strongest: the rival positions in this question — distrust of institutions, social transmission, ordinary reasoning under uncertainty — explain the same behaviour with no psychological deficit at all, and none is addressed.