People believe in conspiracy theories because they are conspiracists

The argument

This argument locates the explanation in the believer rather than in any particular theory. Certain people simply subscribe to a conspiracist world view, constantly believing in conspiracy theories, and what needs explaining is not why they accepted one claim but why they accept so many. The key observation is that belief clusters. Conspiracists do not simply happen to believe in each conspiracy theory they come across; rather they have an altered worldview which means they always elect to explain events as happening due to unseen forces. If each theory were assessed on its own evidence, one would expect believers to be scattered — persuaded by the cases they found convincing and unmoved by the rest. That the same people accept unrelated theories, about different actors and different events, suggests the disposition precedes the evidence. The worldview also explains a feature that an evidence-based account struggles with. It serves to explain why the perceived perpetrators of conspiracy theories are all painted in the same way: monolithic and unrelentingly evil. Unconnected theories describe their villains identically because the description is supplied by the framework rather than by anything found out about the parties involved. Belief of this kind is also self-reinforcing. People enter a cycle in which they are exposed to conspiracist views more and more, and are then more and more likely to believe them themselves — each theory accepted makes the next one easier to accept, and the company kept supplies further material. The claim is deliberately limited. This is not to say that everyone who believes in a conspiracy theory holds a conspiracist worldview; it is that there are certain parts of the population who believe everything is interconnected, and that there is something behind the visible.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Explaining belief by calling believers 'conspiracists' is close to circular: it names the disposition rather than saying where it comes from or why it takes hold. A fixed-personality account also struggles to explain why belief in specific theories rises and falls with events, institutional distrust and social context — the very factors rival positions in this debate emphasise. If a settled worldview were doing all the work, conspiracy belief would not surge around particular crises the way it does. The label may describe a pattern, but it does not explain the belief.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Attributing belief to a conspiracist disposition restates the phenomenon rather than explaining it, and cannot account for why belief tracks events, distrust and social context.